Light Up the Night: a Night Stalkers military romantic suspense Read online

  Trisha flew the weaponized attack version of a Little Bird helicopter, so she hovered close but didn’t go to ground. She wasn’t designed for passengers, only a pilot, a copilot, and enough weapons to rip anyone a new hole if they messed with her. The Killer Egg might be small and egg-shaped but it could take down tanks that weighed fifty times more.

  Merchant and Mad Max were MH-6Ms, tactical transport versions of the Little Bird. They could get close in and dump off four to six operators. The Little Birds were so small that the SOF guys actually sat three on a side on small, fold-down benches running along the outsides of the helo. They were exposed to the wind, but it was a faster load and unload. They had a rope for fast descent into places that a Little Bird helicopter couldn’t land despite its agility.

  They came in quick and low with one Delta Force operator each, who jumped off the benches before the helos touched down. In moments they were shoving rescuees onto the side benches with their backs against the sides of the helicopters and belting them on. As soon as they each had four people on the benches and had slapped helmets onto the hostages’ heads to protect them from the wind, the Little Birds lifted and were instantly headed back toward the beach.

  The D-boys rushed the rest of them toward the Vicious, the transport Black Hawk that had grounded nearby. Unable to fit inside the courtyard, it had landed outside the front gate.

  “May! Three o’clock.” Wrench, the call sign of Air Mission Commander Stevenson, still sitting back on the ship they had launched from, called down the warning. He had a spy drone circling a thousand feet up and keeping an eye on them. It had taken her forever to break the desire to lean out and see if she could spot the blacked-out eyes in the sky of the high-circling drone. Though the military kept trying to kill off that word, everyone still used it. It was supposed to be UAV, unmanned aerial vehicle. Yeah, right. She managed not to look up for the drone because SOAR had drilled into her head to keep her attention on her own problems.

  “I see it!” Trisha called back to Stevenson. She’d been hovering the helo and letting it slowly spin on its axis so that she and Roland, her copilot, swept a complete circle of the area every six seconds. And yet, the AMC spotted the new problem ahead of her. The man was good. She liked that.

  With a slight tip of the cyclic, she aligned her weaponry on a doorway where a whole lot of hostiles were pouring out into the compound’s central courtyard.

  “Do it!” she called to Roland over the intercom. Roland fired a short burst from the M134 Minigun, a three-second burst that was two hundred rounds. It chewed a line of lead and bright-green phosphor tracers in front of the bad guys. The gun also had a roar like an angry dragon. It was scary as shit, even when she was the one firing it. On the ground, it heralded imminent death like a hammer blow.

  Most of the bad-guys-suddenly-in-over-their-heads backpedaled and slammed against the front wall of the building. Two tumbled back through the door where there was no wall to stop their flailing retreat. A couple guys dropped to the ground, probably shot in the legs by rounds that ricocheted off the hard-packed dirt or kicked-up rocks.

  That drew their attention, and their fire, upward. At least they weren’t firing toward the hostage flights anymore.

  Trisha rolled left and then pulled hard right, circling around behind the building. Now the front wall blocked the bad guys from a direct line of fire until they moved farther back from the building, which they’d hesitate over. They’d know that would make them more exposed. It also served to keep their backs toward the ongoing rescue operations.

  She could hear CW Lola Maloney in the Vengeance handling similar problems further into town with her big DAP Hawk. The Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk was the most powerful and effective heli-aviation gunship platform ever launched. But it weighed close to ten times as much as her bird and moved like it. She’d take the tap dance of the Little Bird over the waltz of the DAP any day.

  Trisha slid to a hover behind the building.

  That’s when the RPG came at her out of the back window, triggering a painfully loud audible warning system over the headphones embedded in her helmet. Someone had stayed inside, someone smart who had guessed where her first move would be.

  Nothing she hated more than a rocket-propelled grenade. She’d been downed in Iraq by one of those while still flying for the Screaming Eagles. It hadn’t been an experience she’d enjoyed much, though she’d managed to autorotate to an okay landing. Truth be told, it had actually scared her right out of the sky until her commander, Lieutenant Beale, had booted her ass back into the air.

  She shoved the collective down and drove the bird toward the ground. The RPG shot by with an angry hiss of its rocket motor mere feet over her rotor and a tapering squeal of the audio warning. She leveled May and unleashed a pair of 2.75-inch Hydra 70 rockets into the building. One hit the wall and the other went in through the window before exploding. The tin roof spun up into the air, and the four walls blew outward in a beautiful fireball.

  She climbed up through the flames and, through the screening smoke, spotted the collection of baddies in the front yard still looking for a target. About half were down with chunks of wall on them. The other half began pinging lame-ass 5.56 mm rounds off her forward windscreen.

  “Take ’em!” she called—and Roland did. A five-second burst from the two Miniguns bolted onto the hardpoints that stuck out either side of her bird, aimed with a jiggle on the cyclic to make a figure-eight pattern concentrating their gunfire. That put the baddies out of action.

  The clock said 3:04:03. They’d been in contact for a minute and ten seconds. The hostages should be clear by now.

  Once she climbed clear of the smoke and flames, she saw that the transport Black Hawk was indeed lifting and Maloney was riding protection. The other Little Birds were long gone.

  Trisha was about to bug out when she saw the lone guy standing where the Black Hawk had just lifted.

  At first she thought it might be one of their team, one of the Delta Force boys still on the ground, but he didn’t have the small red shoulder-tabs that would glare in the infrared of her night vision. That would tell her he was a good guy. Nor was he a left-behind hostage, because he had a rifle.

  It was the embedded agent. He was staying behind. There was no way his charade would hold up after a successful rescue of the hostages occurred right under his nose.

  A glance around the neighborhood from her vantage point a hundred feet up in the air told her he was about to be too stupid for words and way too dumb to survive.

  A pair of inbound technicals, pickup trucks with big machine guns mounted in their beds, were racing toward the pirate compound at high speed.

  Cursing loudly, knowing she should be already headed to the beach, she put her nose down and dove into the small courtyard.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Bill shouted at the pilot who had grounded his craft with the rotor inches from him. He’d ducked to keep his head from being chopped off, though the pilot had been pretty damned precise with his positioning. They were only fifteen feet apart.

  “Get aboard!” the pilot was shouting at him. “I’m saving your ass.” Boston. He could hear it in the pilot’s voice even over the beat of the rotors.

  Bill shook his head and waved them off. The pilot and his copilot wore the full flight suits of Special Operations Forces aviators, FN-SCAR rifles strapped across their chests, and large black helmets with black visors covering their faces. The pilot had a big green shamrock painted on the side of his helmet.

  Irish. Boston Irish. It figured. Only an Irishman would be dumb enough to come in and blow his cover.

  “Get out of here! You’re screwing me over!”

  “There are two technicals coming in from the south and west,” the pilot shouted as he kept the blades at near takeoff, the helo actually bouncing its skids on the soil.

  Okay, he had to admit that didn’t sound good. The technicals were the scourge of the Somali streets. A Jeep or a Toyota pickup with a heavy machine gun mounted in the truck’s bed. It would often have five or six other guys with automatic weapons along for the ride.

  Then the pilot jerked his hands from the controls, grabbed the rifle hanging across his chest in one smooth upward sweep, and fired it over Bill’s shoulder. The light of the muzzle flash was blinding, but thankfully he was far enough back to avoid any powder burns. It had been a damn smooth move, worthy of a SEAL.

  He turned to see who the pilot had shot. The muzzle flash of the second shot lit the dingy square.

  Abshir. Now with two holes in his shirt as he fell backward. Good patterning as well; both were probably heart shots. His AK-47 was still aimed at Bill and the helo, but there was no one alive to pull the trigger.

  Okay, maybe the pilot was right and it was getting too hot to stay here. That was one of the problems of running undercover. It became easy to believe that you belonged. That psych condition was trained for, but it was damned difficult to avoid.

  He ducked his head and sprinted to the side of the helo. It was the attack version of the MH-6, so there were no side benches and the tiny inside passenger compartment behind the pilots’ seats was packed with the large ammo cases for the Miniguns.

  He found a spot to hang on to outside, barely, behind the side wings where the weaponry was hung on hardpoints. He slapped the side of the helicopter hard.

  The pilot didn’t waste time looking back.

  They were aloft before Bill had time to place his second foot cleanly on the skid.

  Three technicals were roaring into the area, one appearing far back of the other two.

  He hoped the pilot remembered he was here and didn’t fire any rockets off his side. He’d get serious burns from the rocket motors if he did.

  Trisha cur
sed the man for eight kinds of an idiot. Now she was out of balance with his additional weight on the right side and barely off the ground as three technicals roared into the square.

  She’d fired a thousand-odd rounds and a pair of rockets that would make up for a third of his weight. And she’d burned about ten gallons of fuel since the start of the mission at six-plus pounds a piece, which bought her another third. Still, he made her overweight and it was a major struggle to compensate. Time to dump more ammo, which was fine with her.

  “Open fire, guns only!” she called to Roland and stamped on the left foot-pedal, which would press Mr. Jerk against the helo rather than flinging him off. He’d better hang on anyway.

  Two feet off the ground, the helo spun beneath the rotor like a child’s wooden spinning top. Roland unleashed both M134s as they rotated about their central axis. A line of fire three feet above the ground arced outward like a buzz saw. It sliced through everything in its sweeping path.

  It chewed up the front walls of houses, hammering a line of holes through each burlap door. She hoped that if there was anyone home, they were lying down on the ground, as any sensible person would be during a firefight. Anyone standing up was already shot.

  It also dragged a line of fire across the front of each technical. It shredded radiators, engines, front windshields.

  Roland was reading off rotor blade and tail clearances from the buildings—she couldn’t take time to look herself. But it was exactly what she needed to maintain flight safety.

  By the second rotation of the Little Bird, people were bailing off the truck beds.

  On the third rotation, the two lead technicals exploded in balls of fire, and she decided it was high time to be somewhere else, preferably before her engine scooped up chunks of truck shrapnel.

  “Off!” she called to Roland, and she leveraged her spinning energy into a rolling climb and a lot of forward speed.

  She leaned out and looked back. Their passenger was still there.

  The third technical went up in a ball of fire behind them as she cleared the beach. Not a whole lot of ground fire was following them. She dropped back to wave height, resisting adding a victory roll because of their passenger.

  3:05:30. Two and a half minutes in country.

  “Feet wet.” She called on the radio to let the AMC know she was safely clear of the land and back over the water.

  2

  “I didn’t want a goddamn rescue!”

  Trisha let him rant while she shut down the May.

  The guy was alive on the deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu and complaining about it bitterly. The ship had been scheduled to retire in 2013, but instead it had been given a new lease on life. The Navy had assigned her to the Gulf to anchor United States participation in the anti-Somalia piracy task force, Operation Heavy Hand. She was an aircraft carrier for helicopters—a couple hundred feet shorter, half as wide, and one-third the displacement of her big sisters.

  She’d hit the deck at 03:46:10, right on mission schedule, ten seconds late this time. She made a point of chatting with Roland for a moment before she peeled off her helmet and turned to face the raging idiot.

  The red deck lights for night operations were bright enough that he’d be able to see her clearly. That usually stopped guys cold.

  “Oh fine. A woman. Now I’m probably going to have my ass reamed for yelling at a woman.” Then he continued right along, chewing her out without further pause, which was pretty funny. She let him rant, figuring he’d feel better if he could burn off at least part of his excess, over-righteous macho.

  Embedded agent. She’d expected a skinny black Somali with a rusting AKM rifle looking for a ticket to America. This guy was white as could be and built like a linebacker. Bugfuck crazy to go undercover in Somalia looking the way he did.

  Which, she had to admit, was pretty good despite the ratty clothes and smelling like he’d had a month of too many nights in the desert without a shower. Actually, linebacker looked damn good on this guy. She liked them big and handsome. She also liked his temper. Guys who rolled over and played puppy dog when confronted with a cute woman were dull and predictable. Mr. Agent Man here…

  She climbed down and set her helmet on her seat. As she stood up straight in her boots, he towered over her. Six foot, maybe six-two. SEAL or Delta. Hard to imagine a Delta Force operator yelling at her. D-boys rarely spoke and were rarely over five-eight. So he was a SEAL. It was the blue eyes, eyes that blazed with fury at the moment, that were his outstanding feature. His jet-black hair was a dirty snarl from riding out in the wind without a helmet.

  “I was supposed to bring down Mahan—”

  “If”—Trisha finally had had enough and pushed back—“he was hanging out of the back of the main building with an RPG, I took care of that.” And she managed to suppress the shiver at the memory of that bolt of death coming right at her.

  “Well, that’s something anyway.” He stopped his harangue long enough to take a breath. Then crossed his arms—each bigger around than her legs—over his chest and glared down at her. “But I was supposed to get to his boss too.”

  “Sorry.” She shrugged. “Can’t help you much there unless he was over for dinner last night and still hanging out in the main house.”

  A hint of a smile quirked up one corner of his mouth before he got it under control. She could see the nice things it would do to his face if he ever actually let it loose, which couldn’t be often by the look of him. A heavy scar ran from his left ear and down along his jaw. “I’d know if he was, because the food wouldn’t have sucked as bad as usual. And it did.”

  That got a laugh out of her.

  William Bruce liked that laugh, despite his better judgment. It was bright, from the heart, and lit her up prettier than she already was, which was saying something.

  And she’d saved him, no question. Worse, she knew it.

  So why couldn’t he stop railing at her?

  Without the sound of the rotor washing over them and his ears ringing from the gunfire, her voice and accent were even more distinct. Upper Boston. Well-bred. He didn’t mind the Irish. It was something handy to be pissed about, as he was pure-blood Scots, or as pure as anyone got these days.

  Her voice was also singularly female, and it sounded good on her. Not low and throaty, but rather midrange and rich with nuance. She’d simultaneously expressed absolute contempt for him and deep humor at his rant, the latter finally cooling his jets.

  She stood, hands on narrow hips right above her Browning M1911. Big gun for such a small woman, but she’d already proven she could handle her weapons when she shot Abshir. She didn’t hardly come up to his shoulder, didn’t look to be big enough around to stand up in a strong breeze. Her hair, a feathered chop-cut that reached past her jawline and might have been done with the Ka-Bar knife strapped to her thigh, was a rich red without quite crossing over into carrot orange, and her blue eyes were brilliant on a freckled face.

  Her smile shone, brighter than the deck lights on the flat gray expanse of the assault ship’s deck. Bright and way too sure of itself. And on top of all that she carried herself like a street fighter ready to rumble at a moment’s notice.

  Damn, was the only thing he could think. This woman was far too cute to be real. Like the sassy sidekick in a cop shop, the one any guy with a brain would be lusting after instead of the main babe in uniform. But she had saved his ass, so she must be real.

  “Liked the spinning trick.” He wasn’t going to admit that he’d never seen anything like it before and that it had taken every last ounce of his strength and training to stay aboard while she was doing it.

  “It just came to me.” She cleared the chambered round out of the rifle still hanging across her chest, then snapped it back into the extracted magazine.

  He knew that in that split second after he’d grabbed on, she’d figured out her whole attack plan including which way to spin to make it easiest for him. The other way and the centrifugal force would have thrown him clear without question. She also didn’t use the rockets she’d probably have preferred against the technicals.