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  “Totally worth it,” one of the D-boys announced as soon as he was on the intercom.

  “Great, now I just need to get us out of this alive.”

  “Do that, Pete. We’d appreciate it.”

  He wished to hell he had a stealth bird like the one that had gone into bin Laden’s compound. But the one that had crashed during that raid had been blown up. Where there was one, there were always two, but the second had gone back into hiding as thoroughly as if it had never existed. He hadn’t heard a word about it since.

  It was amazing, the largest city in Tibet and ten kilometers away equaled barren wilderness. He could crash out here and no one would know for decades unless some Yak herder stumbled upon them. Or was Yaks Mongolia? He was a dark-haired, corn-fed, white boy from Colorado, what did he know about Tibet? Most of the countries he’d flown into on black ops missions he’d only seen at night while moving very, very fast. Like now.

  The inside of his visor was painted with overlapping readouts. A pre-defined terrain map, the best that modern satellite imaging could build made the first layer. This wasn’t some crappy, on-line, look-at-a-picture-of-your-house display. Someone had a pile of dung outside their goat pen? He could see it, tell you how high it was, and probably say if they were pygmy goats or full-size LaManchas by the size of their shit-pellets.

  On top of that was projected the forward-looking infrared camera images. The FLIR imaging gave him a real-time overlay, in case someone had put an addition onto their goat house since the last satellite pass, or parked their tractor across his intended flight path.

  His nervous system was paying autonomic attention to that combined landscape. He was automatically compensating for the thin air at altitude as he instinctively chose when to start his climb over said goat house or his swerve around it.

  It was the third layer, the tactical display that had most of his attention. To insert this deep into Tibet, without passing over Bhutan or Nepal, they’d had to add wingtanks on the helicopter’s hardpoints where he’d much rather have a couple banks of Hellfire missiles.

  At least he and the two Black Hawks flying wingman on him were finally on the move.

  While the action team was busy infiltrating the capital city and gathering intelligence on the particularly brutal Chinese assistant administrator, he and his crews had been squatting out in the wilderness under a camouflage net designed to make his helo look like just another god-forsaken Himalayan lump of granite.

  Command had determined that it was better to wait through the day than risk flying out and back in. He and his crew had stood shifts on guard duty, but none of them had slept. They’d been flying together too long to have any new jokes, so they’d played a lot of cribbage. He’d long ago ruled no gambling on deployment after a fistfight had broken out over a bluff that cost a Marine over three hundred dollars. Marines hated losing to Army. They’d had to sit on him for a long time before he calmed down.

  Tonight’s mission was part of an on-going campaign to discredit the Chinese “presence” in Tibet on the international stage—as if occupying the country the last sixty years didn’t count toward ruling, whether invited or not. As usual, there was a crucial vote coming up at the U.N.—that, as usual, the Chinese could be guaranteed to ignore. However, the ever-hopeful CIA was in a hurry to make sure that any damaging information that they could validate was disseminated as thoroughly as possible prior to the vote.

  Not his concern.

  His concern was, were they going to pass over some Chinese sentry post at just under two hundred miles an hour? The sentries would then call down a couple Shenyang J-16 jet fighters that could hustle along at Mach 2 to fry his sorry ass. He knew there was a pair of them parked at Lhasa along with some older gear that would be just as effective against his three helos.

  “Don’t suppose you could get a move on, Pete?”

  “Eat shit, Nicolai!” He was a good man to have as a copilot. Pete knew he was holding on too tight, and Nicolai knew that a joke was the right way to ease the moment.

  He, Nicolai, and his fellow pilots had a long way to go tonight. They dove down into gorges and followed them as long as they dared. They hugged cliff walls at every opportunity to decrease their radar profile. And they climbed.

  That was the true danger—they would be up near the Black Hawks’ limits when they crossed over the backbone of the Himalayas in their rush for India. The air was so rarefied that they burned fuel at a prodigious rate. Their reserve didn’t allow for any extended battles while crossing the border…not for any battle at all really.

  # # #

  It was pitch dark outside her helicopter when Captain Danielle Delacroix stamped on the left rudder pedal while giving the Black Hawk right control on cyclic. It tipped her most of the way onto her side, but let her continue in a straight line. A Black Hawk’s rotor was fifty-four feet across. By cross-controlling her bird to tip it, she managed to execute a straight line between two pylons only thirty feet apart.

  At her current angle of attack, she took up less than a half-rotor of width, twenty-four feet. That left her three feet to either side, sufficient as she was moving at under a hundred knots.

  The training instructor sitting beside her in the copilot’s seat didn’t react as she swooped through the training course in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

  After two years of training with the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, she was ready for some action. At least she was convinced that she was. But the trainers of Fort Campbell, Kentucky had not signed off on her class yet. Nor had they given any hint of when they might.

  She ducked under a bridge and bounced into a near vertical climb to clear the power line on the far side. Like a ride at le carnaval, only with five thousand horsepower.

  To even apply to SOAR required five years of prior military rotorcraft experience. She had applied because of a chance encounter—or rather what she’d thought was a chance encounter at the time.

  Captain Justin Roberts had been a top Chinook pilot, the one who had convinced her to cross-train from her beloved Black Hawk and try out the massive twin-rotor craft. He’d made the jump from the 10th Mountain Division to the 160th SOAR after he’d been in the service for five years.

  Then one night she’d been having pizza in Watertown, New York a couple miles off the 10th’s base at Fort Drum. Justin had greeted her with surprise and shared her pizza. Had said he was just in town visiting old haunts. Her questions had naturally led to discussions of his experiences at SOAR. He’d even paid for the pizza after eating half.

  He’d left her interested enough to fill out an application to the 160th. The speed at which she was rushed into testing told her that her meeting with Justin hadn’t been by chance and that she owed him more than half a pizza next time they met. She’d asked around once she’d passed the qualification exams and a brutal set of interviews that had left her questioning her sanity, never mind her ability. “Justin Roberts is presently deployed, ma’am,” was the only response she’d ever gotten.

  The training course was never the same, but it always had a time limit. The time would be short and they didn’t tell you what it was. So she drove the Black Hawk for all it was worth like Regina Jaquess waterskiing her way to U.S. Ski Team female athlete of the year.

  The Night Stalkers were a damned secretive lot, and after two years of training, she understood why. With seven years flying for the 10th, she’d thought she was good.

  She’d been one of the top pilots at Fort Drum.

  The Night Stalkers had offered an education in what it really meant to fly. In the two years of training, she’d flown more hours than in the seven years prior, despite two deployments to Iraq. And spent more time in the classroom than her life-to-date accumulated flight hours.

  But she was ready now. It was très viscérale, right down in her bones she could feel it. The Black Hawk was as much a part
of her nervous system as breathing. As were the Little Bird and the massive Chinook.

  She dove down into a canyon and slid to a hover mere inches over the reservoir inside the thirty-second window laid out on the flight plan.

  Danielle resisted a sigh. She was ready for something to happen and to happen soon.

  # # #

  Pete Napier and his two fellow Black Hawks crossed into the mountainous province of Sikkim, India ten feet over the glaciers and still moving fast. It was an hour before dawn.

  “Twenty minutes of fuel remaining,” Nicolai said it like personal challenge when they hit the border.

  “Thanks, I never would have noticed.”

  It had been a nail-biting tradeoff: the more fuel he burned, the more easily he climbed due to the lighter load. The more he climbed, the faster he burned what little fuel remained.

  He climbed hard as Nicolai counted down the minutes remaining, burning fuel even faster than he had been crossing the mountains of southern Tibet. They caught up with the U.S. Air Force HC-130P Combat King refueling tanker with only ten minutes of fuel left.

  “Ram that bitch.”

  Pete extended the refueling probe which extended beyond the forward edge of the rotor blade and drove at the basket trailing behind the tanker on its long hose.

  He nailed it on the first try despite the fluky winds.

  “Ah,” Nicolai sighed. “It is better than the sex,” his thick Russian accent only ever surfaced in this moment or in a bar while picking up women.

  His helo had the least fuel due to having the most men aboard, so he was first in line. His Number Two picked up the second refueling basket trailing off the other wing of the HC-130P. A quick five hundred gallons and he was breathing much more easily.

  Another two hours of—thank god—straight and level flight at altitude, and they arrived at the aircraft carrier awaiting them in the Bay of Bengal. India had agreed to turn a blind eye as long as the Americans never actually touched their soil.

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

  “Honor to serve!” He saluted them sharply.

  “Hell yeah!” They shouted in response and saluted in turn. It 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.

  The green escorted him across the hazards of the busy flight deck. Pete pulled his helmet on to buffer the noise of an F-18 Hornet firing up and being flung off the catapult.

  “Orders, Major Napier,” the Commodore handed him a folded sheet. “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 showed up with his duffle 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.

  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.

  ***

  Available at fine retailers everywhere

  More information at: www.mlbuchman.com

  Copyright 2015 Matthew Lieber Buchman

  Published by Buchman Bookworks

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof,

  may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission from the author.

  Discover more by this author at: www.mlbuchman.com

  Cover images:

  U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter © Michael Kaplan | Wikimedia Commons

  Night Lighthouse Beam

  © Joseppi | Dreamstime.com

  Other works by M.L. Buchman

  The Night Stalkers

  The Night Is Mine

  I Own the Dawn

  Daniel’s Christmas

  Wait Until Dark

  Frank’s Independence Day

  Peter’s Christmas

  Take Over at Midnight

  Light Up the Night

  Bring On the Dusk

  Firehawks

  Pure Heat

  Wildfire at Dawn

  Full Blaze

  Wildfire at Larch Creek

  Wildfire on the Skagit

  Angelo’s Hearth

  Where Dreams are Born

  Where Dreams Reside

  Maria’s Christmas Table

  Where Dreams Unfold

  Where Dreams Are Written

  Dieties Anonymous

  Cookbook from Hell: Reheated

  Saviors 101

  Thrillers

  Swap Out!

  One Chef!

  Two Chef!

  SF/F Titles

  Nara

  Monk’s Maze