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  “Sukhoi Su-30 Flanker on your tail. Bird away!” Lola shouted.

  Claudia kicked out flares and chaff, and hauled back on the cyclic, then did a climb-and-flip to point her weapons at the attacker. How had she missed? Nothing there! A Russian fighter capable of cracking Mach 2 was not sneaking up on her tail. Okay, another test, though this one had pumped in a load of adrenaline.

  “Why did you climb, pilot?” Chief Maloney sounded ticked.

  “Unexpected response, ma’am. They’d expect a dive. And it blocks me from any ground-based surveillance or targeting systems, especially when I cross above my own chaff and flares.”

  “Why didn’t you wait for me to release the countermeasures?”

  “Because”—Claudia had been through too many proficiency tests to bristle at the Chief Warrant’s tone—“you hadn’t already done so, and my ability to outrun a Mach 4.5 R-77 air-to-air missile for more than a second or two is nonexistent.”

  “Give me a full dive.”

  Claudia had been thinking a lot about that maneuver Trisha had pulled on her. She crossed the cyclic and rudder control and snap-rolled into an inverted dive, making it a spiral just for good measure. It felt right, just ever so slightly nausea-inducing, which she corrected with pedal trim. She kept the blades at full climb, which, because she was upside down, made their descent very fast.

  They fell five thousand feet in far too few seconds, while she kept her eyes on the altimeter and then ran force loading calculations in her head to not overstrain the new rotor blades as she did the rollout. She was five hundred feet up, instead of Trisha’s two hundred, but she’d take the extra caution on her first attempt. She did a loop-the-loop, climbing up over the top until the Little Bird lay on its back and all of the controls were functioning backward due to inverted flight.

  Allowing for a longer drop, she came out at two hundred and fifty feet above sea level and felt pretty damn pleased with herself.

  “Shit!” was Maloney’s first comment. “You learned that from Trisha, didn’t you? Just what I need, another hot-rodder.”

  “No, ma’am. Not a hot-rodder. Just trying to be the best.”

  “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be in SOAR. And the Training Battalion wouldn’t have specifically recommended you to D company of the 5th Battalion.”

  That was news to her. She was wondering how she’d made it into the notorious 5D.

  “The worst part, Casperson, the part that’s really pissing me off—”

  Claudia tensed and waited for the verdict. Had she done something wrong? She couldn’t think of what.

  “I hate having to admit to O’Malley that she was right. You’re ready and are hereby cleared for all flight operations.”

  Claudia added a victory roll on her way back to the ship.

  * * *

  Michael had invited himself into the air plot room aboard the Peleliu by hinting to Lieutenant Commander Ramis that’s where the LCDR wanted to go. It was only natural for security to admit the man walking at Boyd’s side into the most secure room on the ship. Sometimes stealth was not the required technique when performing an infiltration.

  He wanted to see Claudia’s flight. He didn’t analyze why; he simply knew that he did and followed instinct just as he would on any assignment. Michael had long since learned to trust that little voice of experience.

  He then suggested that one of the duty officers might want to use the stealth Little Bird presently aloft as a training exercise for tracking hostile inbounds. That kept three primary radar screens focused on what Claudia was doing up there. For good measure they added a visual follow with an automated tracking telescope. They had a very hard time keeping a lock on the craft because its radar shielding was very good. Even the visual scope was radar steered, so it fared no better than the strictly electronic systems.

  Michael suggested the infrared targeting system used on the deck guns. That finally gave them a moderately reliable track of her antics on the gun-sight camera, but she still slipped out of frame at least once a minute because her hot engine exhaust was also shielded and even the infrared lock would be lost.

  The blast of flares startled the team and the cloud of chaff punched a hole in the ship’s constant scan for incoming raiders. They all began scanning below the chaff for the helicopter’s new location. Michael spotted Claudia climbing clear over the top but didn’t point her out. She was barely a faint echo on the distant side of the chaff cloud, well hidden even accounting for her stealth gear. If the Peleliu had ridden just a few more kilometers to the west, she’d have been invisible behind the spinning bits of foil.

  The staff only spotted her as she was rolling off into a dive. A crazy damn dive.

  “Get the scope back on her and magnify,” the watch officer called out. “C’mon, team. She’s dusting you again.”

  The buzz in the room disappeared when her image came up on the screen, plummeting downward in a spiraling inverted flight. Her rollout and loop finally made the senior flight controller be the first to break the silence. “Damn!”

  When she did the snap roll, losing no altitude as she did so, Michael couldn’t think of a better description.

  He knew how it felt to always strive to be the best.

  He also knew how it looked when he saw it because he was always looking for it in himself and others.

  “Damn!” indeed.

  Claudia could really fly.

  Chapter 5

  The entire flight of helicopters flew deep into Kenya before doubling back toward the Somali border. The helos settled beside Justin’s Chinook helicopter, Calamity Jane. The Jane had flown in ahead of them and parked deep in the desert to set up a FARP, a forward area refueling-rearming point—a mobile gas station for short-range helicopters like the Little Birds.

  Claudia flexed her hands after she shut down the Maven.

  In moments, a crew swarmed them from the MH-47G Chinook with long fuel hoses that connected back to a massive rubber bladder of fuel in the Jane’s cargo bay. The big Black Hawks could refuel from a KC-135 Stratotanker in flight, but the Little Birds couldn’t waste their limited weight-carrying ability on a heavy refueling probe. And tonight they needed to start the operation with full tanks. Even freshly fueled, they’d have little left over for unpredicted problems along the way.

  Eastern Kenya wasn’t Claudia’s Arizona desert. It was too flat, white instead of red, the trees were all the wrong shapes. It was terribly disorienting and she didn’t even want to step down on it, just in case it wasn’t there in some strange way.

  The sun was an hour from sunset, two hours until full dark. She should stretch her legs, but her nerves were at full jangle. Normally she flew smooth and clean. After six years with the Marines and two more in SOAR training, flight was her natural state. Being on the ground was what felt disjointed.

  “Come with me.” Michael had ridden copilot with her for this first leg. He’d been deep in his strong-and-silent routine. She’d been so busy worrying at the details of the mission like a sore tooth that she’d also had nothing to say. It had been a very quiet ride. Trisha and Bill, paired in the other stealth Little Bird, had probably spent the whole flight chatting about, she didn’t know, China patterns or frag grenades or something equally prosaic.

  Knowing she had to move, she forced herself out of her seat and checked that the ground crew was behaving. After all, this brand-new bird was all hers and she’d spent years working for it. The man and woman of the fuel team wore bright purple vests over their armor, marking them clearly as fuelies, also called grapes because of their vest color.

  Even though she hadn’t fired a shot, a two-man, red-vested ammunition team inspected her craft carefully. These reds kept trying to relabel themselves as “the Red Hot team” and even though one of them was pretty damn handsome, it didn’t stick. The not-quite-so-hot one, but with a better smile, asked her to pl
ease double-check that her weapon and the spare ammo pouches along her thighs were fully stocked. He also ensured that the FN-SCAR combat assault rifle strapped across her chest and her Marine Corps M9 in her hip holster were loaded.

  Once they finally stopped hovering, Michael came around from the other side of the helicopter. She noticed that they didn’t bother to question his readiness. Was it because he was a D-boy and they’d learned not to ask, or was it because she was a woman? Maybe it was just that she was new and they didn’t trust her to have a clue out here in the real world. After almost a decade in the service, she was always ready, so they were going to be disappointed on that point.

  By the look in Michael’s eye, Claudia could see what he was up to. Okay, some things she wasn’t ready for. She cut him off.

  “Please, no. I can’t stand to review the mission one more time. My brain will short-circuit and I’ll be useless.”

  Michael closed his mouth and considered her for a long moment. Then with one of those silent, sideways nods, he turned and led her away from the bustling impromptu airport.

  They’d landed in the deep desert, a dozen miles from anywhere except some trackless stretch of the Somali border. Low scrub trees that Claudia didn’t recognize were scattered every few hundred meters. Bushes under a meter high might have been related to the creosote ones that dotted the hills of Bumble Bee. Here the sands were very white, rather than the yellow and red of her home hills. And instead of hills, there were just miles of flat land that would be of use to no one except perhaps a really desperate camel.

  Michael came to a stop just over the first rise.

  Claudia walked up until they were standing side by side looking out at the endless expanse of dusty green brush, white sand, and dusty blue sky. With the helicopters out of sight behind them, and even the fuel pump noises muted by the shallow rise, she felt as if she could suddenly breathe for the first time in ages.

  She hadn’t missed the feeling when she was in the middle of it all. There’d been no time to just stop in months. The final part of Green Platoon training for SOAR was no easier than the beginning part. Helicopters, tactics, explosives, language, first aid…the trainers had inundated her with information, methodologies, and endless practice during every second they’d had her in their control.

  That had been followed by an immediate assignment to Operation Atalanta, travel, the Yemeni terrorist camp, and all of the intensity of mission planning before she even had met most of the flight crews.

  Five days ago, she’d been signing out of her billet in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, sweating beneath the moist heat of a May afternoon. Now she was sweating like a dog beneath the setting sun in the arid furnace of the African desert.

  Finally, for a brief moment, there was peace in her world. The soft breeze, though not enough to cool her brow, occasionally rustled the dry branches together. Some small animal chirruped in the distance. Far aloft, a scavenger circled, perhaps wondering if the new visitors would have the decency to die here so that it could feed.

  “There will be dead enough this night,” she told it. Just follow the Night Stalkers. A grim thought for the start of a mission, no matter how true. She just needed to remind herself that some of these hostages had been three and four years in captivity. Someone who would do that to another human being didn’t deserve to live.

  Most of the hostages belonged to various uninsured ships with owners who had disappeared rather than pay the multimillion-dollar ransoms. For some reason, the Somali pirates held on, hoping that somehow money would fall out of the skies. Well, tonight something certainly would. The Night Stalkers would be delivering the weight of the American military.

  * * *

  “Stop thinking about the mission. Just listen to the desert.” Michael kept his voice to a whisper.

  Claudia nodded once, then again before appearing to finally relax the tensed-up line of her shoulders.

  He waited a while longer.

  “I grew up here. Became a woman in the desert.”

  He had become a man climbing the trees. First the maples and oaks of his backyard, then the towering Douglas firs that often reached a hundred or more feet above the ground and grew around the campus where his parents were professors. The redwoods had been inevitable in his quest to go highest, to be the best. The few who ascended the Titans, as the biggest trees of them all were called, were a small community and not a one of them could outclimb him.

  Claudia’s experience must be different. It would be—

  “My parents weren’t real involved. My father had a bad back injury and was on lifetime disability. He was a real bummer.” Claudia momentarily remembered how her father’s shroud of silence lay over the house like suppressive fire, killing off all expression and action. It wasn’t a gentle or benign peace. “The man really should have taken antidepressants or something.”

  He smiled but did not laugh.

  “Yeah, some joke,” she acknowledged. “I spent a lot of time on my old horse, Squib. We’d ride up into the hills for hours, sometimes days. Just the two of us alone in the Castle Creek Wilderness or camping at Upper Dead Cow Spring.”

  Michael had never been to Arizona, but he’d been in several war games in the Nevada desert—he’d even designed a couple of games until the Navy, Army, and Air Force got together and asked the Joint Special Operations Command for a challenge their people had some chance of achieving. The point was to find a way to achieve the impossible, but that day he’d learned that regular forces weren’t Delta and needed different standards.

  And he’d certainly fought in many other deserts all over the world. This one’s smell of mineral, salt, and sand would be wrong to her. She’d have ridden among sweet lupine, astringent juniper, and biting creosote over iron-tinged sands.

  “I read a lot,” she continued softly. “Anything I could lay my hands on, including local history. It is called Yavapai County for a reason. The Yavapai were a people forced onto reservations with the Apache. I read that there they adopted the Sunrise Dance ceremony. When a woman reaches puberty, there is a four-day ritual of dance and blessings to welcome the girl to womanhood. I liked the sound of that.”

  Michael’s transition to manhood had probably been his first solo Titan ascent. He’d been fourteen, and his parents had become too old and cautious to climb the big trees any more. At three hundred feet above the ground, he’d laughed. He’d also wept there for the last time, with no one there to see what he had achieved.

  Solo.

  “You were alone.”

  She nodded, then, after a long time, continued.

  “I was thirteen when I spent four days in the desert. Four days and nights I danced and did not sleep. There was no medicine man or godmother, so I made up my own blessings. And I ran.”

  Claudia pointed east. “They run each morning of the ceremony, so I ran for the child.” She turned north. “The girl.” She continued around the compass. “The woman, and finally old age. I ran for hours every day. I finally realized that I was running toward something rather than away. That is where I learned that I was the only one responsible for my journey. That is the day I made myself and knew that no matter what team I joined, I did it alone.”

  Michael had learned the same lesson as a child and then searched until he found it again in the armed forces.

  “For the first month of the Delta Selection Process, you have no name among the instructors. You’re Green Five, Red Three; it changes every day. There are no team or buddy activities like the other forces. It is completely a solo effort, every brutal inch of it.”

  “Which you loved.”

  “Which I loved,” he admitted.

  Claudia turned to face him. Framed by the sunset light rippling over the Kenyan desert, she was golden.

  “I’ve never told anyone about that. Or about the silence.” Her voice was a caress. “I thought only I could hear i
t, but you can too.”

  He nodded. He did hear it. Even a single heartbeat before battle. Perhaps especially then he could hear the small moments of silence.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you,” she said softly.

  * * *

  Claudia could feel herself going soft in the head for Colonel Michael Gibson. He was like a guy wearing a tool belt taken to the hundredth power.

  Michael stood beside her in the Kenyan desert with the gentle evening breeze riffling his hair. He wore Crye Precision MultiCam camouflage beneath his heavy weapons harness. He carried minimal survival gear and maximum ammunition. Silenced rifle, submachine gun, two handguns, a big knife, grenades…

  He looked dangerous, like death walking the land.

  Yet he was also beautiful in the quiet sunset as they waited for the last of it to give way to the moment when the stars would command the sky.

  As a D-boy colonel, he was perhaps the most effective field soldier alive. Those skills didn’t show on the surface. There was no hardness of expression to go with his hardness of body. His hands didn’t clutch his weapons, nor were his thumbs tucked in with his ammo magazines.

  He stood at peace and watched her. Even that watching wasn’t some deep assessment. Rather it was as if he simply saw all of her.

  There was a question she wanted to ask, but this time she didn’t.

  It was too big.

  Perhaps too dangerous.

  She didn’t even dare to ask it of herself.

  Instead, she simply hooked a finger through the D-ring at the center of his harness and pulled him toward her.

  Before their lips touched, she knew this wasn’t going to be some little kiss of testing and tasting.

  A heat rose up from within her. The heat of the desert. The fire of upcoming battle. The need to prove that she was alive. That however true the image of the Ice Queen might be to the rest of the world, for this man in this moment, she could be far more.