Target of the Heart Page 2

  Once standing on the deck—and the worst of the kinks worked out—he pulled his team together: six pilots and seven crew chiefs.

  “Honor to serve!” He saluted them sharply.

  “Hell yeah!” They shouted in response and saluted in turn. It was their version of spiking the football in the end zone.

  A petty officer in a bright green vest appeared at his elbow, “Follow me please, sir.” He pointed toward the Navy-gray command structure that towered above the carrier’s deck. The Commodore of the entire carrier group was waiting for him just outside the entrance. Not a good idea to keep a One-Star waiting, so he waved at the team.

  “See you in the mess for dinner,” he shouted to the crew over the noise of an F-18 Hornet fighter jet trapping on the #2 wire. After two days of surviving on MREs while squatting on the Tibetan tundra, he was ready for a steak, a burger, a mountain of pasta, whatever. Or maybe all three.

  The green escorted him across the hazards of the busy flight deck. Pete had kept his helmet on to buffer the noise, but even at that he winced as another Hornet fired up and was flung aloft by the catapult.

  “Orders, Major Napier,” the Commodore handed him a folded sheet the moment he arrived. “Hate to lose you.”

  The Commodore saluted, which Pete automatically returned before looking down at the sheet of paper in his hands. The man was gone before the import of Pete’s orders slammed in.

  A different green-clad deckhand showed up with Pete’s duffle bag and began guiding him toward a loading C-2 Greyhound twin-prop airplane. It was parked number two for the launch catapult, close behind the raised jet-blast deflector.

  His crew, being led across in the opposite direction to return to the berthing decks below, looked at him aghast.

  “Stateside,” was all he managed to gasp out as they passed.

  A stream of foul cursing followed him from behind. Their crew was tight. Why the hell was Command breaking it up?

  And what in the name of fuck-all had he done to deserve this?

  He glanced at the orders again as he stumbled up the Greyhound’s rear ramp and crash landed into a seat.

  Training rookies?

  It was worse than a demotion.

  This was punishment.

  Chapter 2

  By the time the C-130 transport jet he’d hitched a ride in across the country smacked down at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Major Pete Napier still didn’t know what to make of his orders. Command had clearly lost their marbles. And sending him out looking for them was just pissing him off.

  But, when the orders had pulled him off of forward deployment and sent him stateside to test trainees, it had probably been a good career move not to call the Commodore who delivered the orders an ignorant ass. Navy Commodores didn’t take any more kindly to such things than Army Brigadier Generals—no matter how richly the compliment might be deserved in both cases.

  He hit the main desk at Fort Campbell with a severe dose of jet leg and a lethal dose of foul mood.

  The desk orderly gave him a room key for the transient quarters in the Richardson Complex, informing him that it was for a maximum three-day occupancy so alternate arrangements should be made rapidly. As if base transient quarters were such a luxury. He managed not to execute the man on the spot, mostly because his sidearm was stowed in his duffle.

  Pete didn’t plan on being here longer than it took to track down his commander and talk his way back up to forward deployment. The trick was to do it without earning a court-martial for punching out a superior officer.

  The guard also gave him a pass for the gate to the Night Stalkers compound and instructions to report immediately upon arrival to Colonel Cassius McDermott, the commander of the entire U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Perfect. Exactly the man he needed to tackle.

  Pete found a corporal to give him a lift, but was dumped unceremoniously outside the 160th’s front gate with his gear. “Sorry, sir. I’m not authorized inside the compound.”

  The midday heat had baked into the pavement and was re-radiating with a vengeance as evening threatened to exceed a hundred-percent humidity even if it had to make up numbers to do it.

  His body and his clothes were still oriented for the summer chill of Tibet and the not much warmer temperature of Air Force transports at altitude. He’d only been so much cargo to them: pressurized air was provided begrudgingly, heat not at all.

  Pete thought wistfully of flying over the cool Himalayas as he slung on his pack and trudged through the heat, the blazing idiocy of security, and the long dusty stretch to the Colonel’s on-base office—a bolthole for when he wasn’t at the Pentagon doing whatever useless crap they performed there.

  At least when Pete reported he was ushered straight into “the presence.”

  Colonel Cassius McDermott answered his salute with, “Pete, sit your sorry ass down. You look whipped, boy.” He would have remained standing, but his legs didn’t think that was really advisable at the moment and he collapsed into a chair.

  “What the hell am I doing mingling with the recruits, Cass? And what’s a One-Star doing messing with Night Stalker assignments?”

  Cass McDermott had always been there for him: when Pete was a fresh-faced idiot Army National Guard pilot, when climbing the career ladder, even through an ugly marriage that led to an uglier divorce—all of it.

  McDermott’s field office was so plain that it might have belonged to a clerk, except for the photos of the Colonel shaking hands with each of the last three Presidents. The three photos and the American flag were the only relief to the colorlessness of the room; beige and khaki.

  Cass leaned back in his chair and studied Pete through narrowed eyes like he was looking at a bug. Friend or not, the Colonel was like that. He wasn’t just the commander of SOAR, he was SOAR. The man had flown every ugly mission there was for thirty years. But he didn’t flaunt it. The only evidence of who this man really was appeared in the ever-expanding array of medals in the three progressive photos.

  Rumor was they’d tried to promote him to JSOC half a dozen times and he’d refused. Well, Joint Special Operations Command’s loss was definitely SOAR’s gain. Pete respected few people beyond the cockpit, but McDermott was one of them.

  “The Commodore was handy. They’re actually my orders, but I figured I needed a bit of rank to deliver them so that you didn’t spit in the messenger’s face.”

  “Thought about doing more than spitting, but he’d already ducked and run.”

  “You don’t rise to command an entire aircraft carrier group by being stupid.”

  Pete grimaced. He knew his reputation was bad, but that bad? He preferred being in the field, that was all. He didn’t suffer fools lightly. That was a skill that a good trainer needed and he totally lacked.

  McDermott looked at his watch and then back at Pete.

  Pete had a sudden bad feeling about what was going to happen next, but the look on McDermott’s face shifted as if he’d thought better of something.

  “Tell you what. You go look the crew over and then we’ll talk. I even provided you with a pair of ringers.”

  Pete waited, but the Colonel wasn’t doing any explaining. Instead he rose to his feet, forcing Pete to struggle to his own.

  “Here are the night’s orders,” McDermott handed over a single sheet of paper. He didn’t give Pete time to look at them, instead offering a sharp salute. “I’ll see you in eight hours. Dismissed.”

  Once in the outer office, Pete looked at the sheet. It would have been cryptography to anyone other than a Night Stalker.

  To his trained eye, it read like only one thing.

  He decided that Cass McDermott wasn’t the only man who was wise enough to know when to duck. Cass had done it by making sure that Pete had been neatly ushered out of the Colonel’s office before Pete had had a chance to look at the orders and hea
ve them back in the Colonel’s face.

  He’d been awake for three days now and in ten minutes he was scheduled to face rookies.

  Rookies!

  Shit!

  # # #

  Captain Danielle Delacroix brushed a bang of dark hair out of her eyes and surveyed her classmates gathered in predictable clusters in front of the barracks that housed Special Operations Aviation Training Battalion. The hangar had been their semi-permanent home these last two years, when they weren’t further afield training in the worst terrain the SOATB could find.

  They had started with over a hundred and twenty men and six women. They now stood at eight and two, one of the highest graduation rates in history…if they’d graduated. None of them were sure, and that was presently the sole topic of conversation, which frankly bored her to death at this point.

  The 160th’s trainers gave you information when you needed it and not a single second before. Second-guessing was a waste of effort, something she wasn’t a big fan of.

  Predictably, they were winging around a couple of Frisbees; so gob-smack frustrated that most of them had joined in rather than continue discussing their unknown future. They used glow-in-the-dark discs which, in the falling dusk, made their pale-green color almost impossible to see.

  One whistled sharply when thrown due to a 7.62 millimeter hole some Al-Qaeda fanatic had shot through it. It belonged to the Might Quinn—a big Alaskan native. The Whistler was a real favorite among the crew, practically a mascot. It always sounded like a little cry to her when it flew. It was covered with signatures: some fresh and clear, others faded, some of the living, others who were no longer. Most of the trainees had signed it, perhaps all except her.

  Stray throws came her way once or twice and she shot it back, but she remained separate, outside their game.

  Their group still had a Sergeant and two Sergeants First Class who flew as crew chiefs and gunners in the back of the Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters.

  The class had become small enough that a rotating group of instructor pilots were often sent to fill in the gaps—they needed two extra crew chiefs and one pilot whenever they all flew together.

  Tonight’s crew chiefs were a pair she’d never seen before: a big, powerful man who it was hard to imagine fitting in a helo, and a woman who barely came to his shoulder. They stood easily together off to the side with none of the foot-shifting and constant looking over their shoulders that marked the trainees.

  The players winged a disc at them a couple of times as a test. Each time the big guy stretched out a long arm, snagged it out of the air, and then sent it pounding back so hard that a missed catch sent someone running a long way after it.

  The pilots and copilots, if they were anywhere else, would have been divided by aircraft type: Little Birds, Black Hawks, and Chinooks. But this was the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and the Night Stalkers were so far outside the curve that they tended to gather together regardless of the platform they flew. Or perhaps it was that if the pilots divided by platform they’d each be standing alone; there weren’t many of them left after two years of training. Eighty-five percent hadn’t made it out of the first three weeks.

  A pair of Chief Warrants, one Second Lieutenant who had made the jump from being a backseater shortly before applying for SOAR, three Lieutenants, and herself—The Lone Captain. Didn’t quite have the ring of The Lone Ranger, and she didn’t even have a Tonto. As the sole remaining Chinook pilot, her copilot was always a trainer. And whoever he was, he was late.

  It was odd how different the world was between those who flew in the backs of America’s military helicopters and those who piloted the craft. She had tried to blend, but the line had been drawn deeply in prior service and even here few crossed between them—the Frisbee game making one of the few social bridges between the front and backseaters.

  Danielle hadn’t intended to turn “outsider” into a science any more than she’d meant to turn “gifted” into a reason to be isolated throughout her school years. She’d decided she had two choices, get angry every time they sat her close beside the teacher’s desk so that she could be given advanced work that all of the other kids would resent, or become little Miss Perfect. Somewhere along about third grade, yet again the teacher’s pet because she knew all of the answers, her brain discovered a third option.

  She watched and she laughed, silently of course. People were about the funniest things on the planet. And, because she was such an outsider, no one ever dared ask what made her smile at the oddest of times. Danielle reached up a hand to check. Yes, she was smiling at the predictability of the groupings, right down to her own hermitic self.

  To an outsider, there was very little to distinguish the candidates. It would appear that you could rearrange the pieces on this chessboard with no effect. All wore flightsuits and Army boots. They each had survival vests, FN-SCAR rifles strapped across their chests—though the ammunition was issued wrapped in plastic and you’d better have a damn good reason to have broken the security wrapper on U.S. soil—and helmets stacked off to the side of the game.

  To an insider, it was only in knowing the individuals’ habits and quirks that separated them, but that separation was obvious. Most of the crew chiefs had a free hand on one or another of their weapons when they weren’t chasing the Frisbee. The pair of instructors also displayed this habit. Whereas pilots never knew what to do with their hands on the ground. They looked lost without a helicopter’s cyclic and collective to hold onto, like a gamer looked when you suddenly unplugged his computer.

  Other than the two new crew chiefs, she was the only one standing off to the side; disconnected, her hands in a studied neutral position. Originally she’d done it so that she could fit in with either group—and it worked for that. But she now understood that it also made her not fit in with either group.

  Danielle had been called many things over her seven years in the U.S. Army before SOAR…actually for her entire life before applying to the 160th: aloof, distant, stuck up, men had called her lesbian, and lesbians had called her bitch.

  She’d tried to leave that behind when she left the 10th Mountain Division to apply for SOAR, and mostly succeeded. Oh, she’d overheard conjectures that she didn’t hit the town bars because she was a Mormon or had a lover back home who had made her promise never to enter a bar. In some tales her lover was male, other times a woman, and a few other typically Army suggestions involving both higher numbers and lower life forms that she chose to ignore.

  She actually had no one waiting at home but by not commenting on the rumor of a hidden lover, it had grown and kept most of the unwanted attention away.

  Danielle didn’t go into bars because they were loud, smelly, and her mother was an alcoholic. She’d called Danielle close for what Danielle knew were her mother’s last words—she’d asked for a gin and tonic. It used to make Danielle physically ill just to watch someone drink.

  It was one of the things she liked about SOAR. They were on constant alert and the rules said twenty-four hours between a drink and a flight. Regular crews could count on a week off here and there, but not the trainees. There seemed to be a gleeful sadism among the trainers’ cadre in promising vacation time and then blowing it up with a call-to-mission alert only after you were in transit.

  Danielle had learned to work with the people of SOAR more smoothly because she completely owned the only currency that truly counted to the Night Stalkers—she flew better than almost anyone. It had been built into her DNA or blown into her bloodstream by a radioactive spider bite or something. She liked the idea of the spider. Spidey rules! If she ever met a man named Peter Parker she was going to marry him on the spot and they’d have superior radioactive children.

  Danielle’s secret identity wasn’t her everyday self, it was her superhero occupation. When she was stuck in airports, restaurants, whenever out in public and the men came aroun
d—they always did—she’d use it. She learned quickly that she had to set the rules or they’d never go away.

  Danielle invented the simplest of challenges to turn away the unwelcome attention.

  “Guess what I do for a living. Three guesses and then you’re gone. Guess right and I’ll let you stay.” Men understood bounded rules, even when the deck was stacked against them.

  “Model.”

  “Actress.”

  “Singer/performer.”

  Those always took top spots. Especially country-western singer, which was odd since her bloodline and her accent were Québécois French and her musical preferences were primarily medieval, through renaissance and baroque to the classical period. She danced to modern music—when absolutely no one was watching—but for listening Mozart was recent enough for her tastes.

  No one had yet guessed military or even any kind of flying, other than—

  “Stewardess.”

  —which she always corrected with…

  “Flight attendant, but no.”

  Their general lack of creativity was astonishing. She eventually had tried announcing that she was none of the standard three right up front just to see what they came up with, but that stupefied most men into silence. Those who recovered invariably went to:

  “Dental hygienist.”

  Someone had guessed:

  “Language teacher.”

  Which she’d almost given him partial credit for. Like most Night Stalkers, she spoke several languages other than her native French and English. But then he’d followed up with:

  “Porn star.”

  And she’d booted his ass.

  Danielle belonged in the Night Stalkers, yet here she stood off to the side observing both herself and her classmates. She belonged but didn’t. Which meant…

  Her idle speculations were dragged beyond the gathering of trainees by the man stamping into view around the hangar from the direction of Regimental Command. Her missing Chinook copilot?