I Own the Dawn: The Night Stalkers Read online

  Suddenly the Hawk pulled a hard left. Her stomach hadn’t noticed the extreme limits of control that the Major used throughout the firefight. Big John had been right. To fly with the woman wasn’t a bad gig at all.

  And there was no way she’d quit. She’d never again miss a flight.

  They turned down the valley and climbed high enough for safety as they headed home. Kee fired a short burst into the mountainside to make sure the new belt was tracking well then let the gun drop against the stops.

  Someone must have finally released the 101st Apaches now that the fight was over and the morning light hinted at the eastern horizon. She couldn’t wait for the next time she ran into their pilots back at some cozy, safe air base with AC and iced Coca Cola. She was gonna smoke their behinds.

  With the dirty work done, Beale’s Hawk headed home.

  And Kee felt that she once again belonged in her seat. Almost.

  Chapter 12

  Archie sat on the second bench up from the soccer field, not far from the chow tent, and held out his hands. Dilya knelt beside him as she wrapped a loop of string over them. He knew Cat’s Cradle well enough but was a little surprised that she did.

  He waited for instructions to pick up the opposite loops with his forefingers. With long, fine fingers as quick as darts, she snagged the crossed strings between thumb and forefinger and scooped them under and through. When she pulled her hands apart, a new string design appeared.

  He continued his sham of acting slow to catch on, forcing her to walk him through each of his steps slowly. With a huff at one of his dropped strings, she unleashed a rattle of Uzbek at him.

  He smiled and methodically reset the starting figure, looking at her to check that he had done it correctly.

  And they were off again.

  It was comfortable with her. No words needed. Only with Major Beale had he ever felt as comfortable. While their families didn’t know each other, their backgrounds were similar enough that they knew of each other. His father a high-end sailboat builder and his mother a government consultant in Boston. Her father was the director of the FBI, but she was fairly closemouthed about that, as you’d expect. Her mother was a Washington socialite who Emily claimed didn’t know what to do with herself now that her only child had married. At least they were on a level.

  They’d studied together at West Point and fought together for so long since that there was no question of anything between them. He could simply relax around her, as much as anyone did around Emily Beale.

  This time Archie acknowledged remembering the fourth figure, much to Dilya’s hand-clapping delight.

  But any friendship with the Major was tempered more by their differences than connected by any similarities. His default entry into Army flying versus Emily’s full-charge attack. The Major’s belief that rules were to be shattered versus his own efforts to be adroit and skilled within the guidelines of operations. Her intense attractiveness to and comfort with the opposite sex. She spoke guy-speak better than most men. His complete ineptness with any woman.

  Dilya decided they knew Cat’s Cradle well enough for now and started him on a new figure, one he quickly recognized as Apache Door. Wonder what it is in your language, little one?

  He knew certain figures were universal, but Dilya was Uzbek, a mostly Muslim people. Who had taught the girl representational images? Perhaps a Russian soldier. Would her parents be upset if they knew? Were her parents still alive somewhere to care?

  ***

  Kee pounded down her last lap around the field. She’d sign over her next paycheck if she could run cross-country rather than chasing stupid little circles around and around and around inside the stadium. But getting picked off by some random goatherd with a thirty-year-old AK-47 didn’t hit high on her list of good-time ideas.

  Around lap ten, a couple of the Rangers set camp chairs along the track. They popped water bottles and watched her go by. They tried hooting and casting insults about lap fifteen.

  “Baby girl flier. Can’t even get into combat. Gotta stay all safe in the air.”

  “Runs like a man with boobs.”

  “Runs like a boob who just needs a good man.”

  She considered stopping and pounding one particular sergeant into a bloody pulp, but didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. And telling them she’d done a ground tour with the 10th Mountain still wouldn’t impress them. Rangers were convinced only those who’d hacked their way through Airborne training counted. Maybe. Maybe not. They weren’t the kings of the hill either. She’d been there and done that. Airborne and Ranger were only two of the steps before you could even apply to SOAR.

  Then there were the Delta operators doing some elaborate drill she couldn’t make out. They ignored her completely each time she passed near their camp by the far goal.

  By lap twenty, she decided that if it was a show they wanted, it was a show they’d get.

  It was a new trick for Kee. She’d been in lockup a dozen times for settling arguments with her fists. Of course, she’d always looked much better than the guys locked up in the next cell over. “Self-defense” kept her out of some of it, until a little trainer lady named Trisha O’Malley had pounded the shit out of her for falling to the guys’ levels.

  The woman was unbeatable, and Kee’d gone back and been trounced by her a dozen more times trying to learn. She’d learned plenty, especially that First Sergeant Trisha O’Malley truly was unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat. But she’d also learned to ignore guys who were just too damn stupid to understand that Sergeant Kee Smith wasn’t all that far behind her.

  Now she’d simply run them into the ground. Lap thirty, about eight miles in the blistering heat, they got bored and drifted away looking for a new plaything. One that reacted and twitched. By lap forty, ten miles down, they were nowhere to be seen.

  She did a trot lap and a walk lap just to ease back down, though she was still dripping when she passed through the chow tent and knocked back a couple bottles of water and two salt pills. She stepped out beneath the shadow of the extended entry flap hoping to catch some edge of a breeze.

  And then she saw Dilyana and the Professor. Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the second row of the bleachers, laughing.

  Dilyana hadn’t laughed with Kee but the one time. And that had been when Kee’d imitated Dilya puking on the Professor. The girl smiled sometimes, pretty easily in fact. When Kee wasn’t flying or working out, the kid hung by her side like a leech. It had bugged her at first, but the kid was so damn sweet about it. And Kee was so relieved to see her up and around after the surgery that she wasn’t about to complain. But they didn’t laugh together.

  The hard part had been the work with the phrase book. Sections on shopping, dining, and lodging did little to help in a wartime environment. She’d yet to pin down where Dilya’s parents were.

  “Walk.” Dilyana’s definitive word whenever Kee tried to dig into her past. Kid was strong as a gazelle, but would always find the shortest route across camp, climbing and crossing through helicopter cargo bays rather walking around. And she sat down the instant she arrived. Sick to death of walking. Or perhaps she’d learned the critical warrior lesson to conserve energy at every chance, so you had it aplenty when it hit the fan and you had to be somewhere else fast.

  Piece by piece Kee put Dilyana’s story together, word by word. Many times outside the scope of the little phrase book. They playacted to communicate the word “hide.” That one became almost as popular as “walk.”

  The morning that Kee came up with “dead” by imitating the crack of a bullet as it zipped by your ear with its tiny sonic boom and then falling over with her eyes closed, Dilyana had screamed. That had been a real pain to fix. The girl wouldn’t even speak until the evening and had spent the day curled up in a tight little ball on Kee’s cot. Kee had finally climbed in with her and held her close through her precious downtime. Afraid that the little girl would never speak to her again, Kee hadn’t slept a wink.

  She
had tried to imagine why she cared. In the street gangs she’d made a point of not caring. You were tough or you were dead. If you got attached to someone, then a cop shot him down while he was trying to get some dough for his next fix. Or your best girl, who always watched your back, suddenly flipped out and became a coke whore, or got busted into rehab or juvie. Kee had only broken her rule once and regretted it to this day.

  But Dilya had opened a crack in Kee’s armor, and she couldn’t figure out how to close it back up. Standing here, watching the girl giggle as the Professor once again dropped a string from his fingers, Kee knew she was screwed. This eleven-year-old pipsqueak had gotten to her.

  When she’d been a ground pounder in the regular army, Kee learned that the squad was her team. Knew it to the core. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they were all guys. All had their own agenda.

  Actually, the girls always had their own agenda, too. The women were always afraid, once they latched onto some jerk, that another woman was gonna steal him. With such a misbalance in genders, being a warrior woman looking for a man in the U.S. Army was like being in a carnival shooting gallery with an M134 minigun. You couldn’t miss, so why would you poach?

  All the women either hung with each other and looked weak for not mixing, or they were tough as hell and didn’t hang with each other because they got tired of being called lesbians. Kee found it best to never hang with anybody except for training, workouts, and sex.

  The only one in this woman’s Army she couldn’t figure was the Major. Emily Beale really flew, the Professor only the copilot. Only. That meant he lived for navigation, armament other than the miniguns, systems status of the chopper, and tactical advice for the pilot. And backup flier if his pilot was hurt. Pilot and copilot in a DAP Hawk was a crazy symbiosis that only the very best could make work. Kee should have known that from the beginning.

  No question that Beale flew. And Kee had ridden enough birds to know that few pilots were so smooth or quick. She wondered if half the legend might be true. Big John had insisted that the Major had earned that Silver Star fair and square.

  The woman didn’t fit any of Kee’s patterns. She’d been absolutely standup about Dilyana. Another major point in Kee’s book. And about Kee’s failure to fly. That had shocked Kee to the core. She’d let down the team, failed in her sworn duty, and Major Beale had let her back aboard. Once. Kee knew there would be no second chance.

  But independence wasn’t easy. Nobody really spoke to her, though Big John had loosened up a little. Keeping Jeff alive on the flight back had both shaken him and built up his confidence once it was clear Jeff had survived because of him.

  Dilyana laughed in the sunlight with the Professor.

  And Kee Smith stood in the shadows of the chow tent, alone.

  Separate. Outside their circle of laughter.

  Dilyana had woken trembling in the middle of their downtime and had taken the book from Kee’s pocket. She had lain there tight against Kee, studying and studying for an hour or more, while Kee pretended to sleep, wished she could sleep. At length the girl closed the book and snuggled a little closer to Kee.

  When she spoke in the darkness of the tent, Kee could feel the words vibrating her body as well as her ears. Whispers. Whispers driven home with the force of a cannon.

  “Mother. Father. Walk. Walk. Walk. Hide. Hide. Hide. Cold. Walk. Walk. Walk.” Then silence, then she made the cracking sound of a passing bullet. Twice.

  A sound you could only make correctly if you’d heard a hundred of them go by close enough to have had your name on them. But they found the person behind you. When she’d still been infantry, everyone would sit around bored out of their skulls in the quiet between the adrenaline rush of one firefight and the next. One pastime, the grunts would take turns trying to imitate the tiny, sonic-boom crack beside your ear.

  The more you heard, the better your imitation. You learned to break it down. The timbre of the initial snap, the shriek of the whistle while it passed within a couple inches, the Doppler drop-off as it moved on. And that dreadful wait, hoping it hit rock or dirt with a sharp slap rather than turning into a silent moment and then the cry of a gut-shot guy who was supposed to have your backside.

  Dilyana’s imitation was near perfect.

  “Dead. Family dead. Home dead.” And then she’d wept. And Kee had held her. Held her more tightly than when they’d returned from the refugee camp. More tightly than she’d ever held anyone before. Like she’d often imagined a father would hold on to her, if her mother had known who he was. Or dreamed her mother would, even once, instead of dying a dose at a time.

  On her first leave from the Army, Kee had looked for her mother but not found her. Even the Street didn’t know where she’d gone. The Street had finally swallowed her mother whole and left nothing behind.

  They were all of them lost. The Professor and Dilyana with their string figures. Kee herself. Lost in the shadows.

  ***

  Archie had watched Kee run. Counted every lap, struggling to hide his distraction from the little girl. He was charmed by Dilya as if she were one of his nieces. There wasn’t a bone in the child’s body that didn’t radiate joy. And it shone ten times as brightly knowing even a little of what the girl had survived.

  Kee didn’t radiate joy, she radiated pure power in its truest form. She ran the track like a mythical cross between the fleet-footed Hermes, messenger to the Greek gods, and a B-2 bomber. She plowed ten miles around the track, moving as strongly the last lap as she had the first. A feat most men couldn’t achieve, especially in the midday heat. No wonder she scared the hell out of him. Granted, every woman scared the hell out of him, but in Kee Smith he’d unearthed that finest of treasures, the essence. The true definition. The ideal upon which all of the other women were based.

  And when she finished her run, she approached them through the shadows of the tent, ultimately stopping out of Dilya’s sight. He watched her watch him and Dilya playing. What did she see when she looked at him? Gangly Archibald Stevenson III.

  And now she stood unmoving in the shadows, staring at him. Glaring at him perhaps? Wasn’t he supposed to enjoy his time with Dilya? He’d certainly been terrified enough when Dilya fell ill. Had he somehow handled it wrong in Kee’s eyes?

  Did she think him less of a man for playing with a child? Would it help to know that halfway through her run he had gone to the Rangers’ commander and informed him that if his men ever again harassed one of Beale’s crew, they’d never set foot on a 5th Battalion SOAR bird again? Would she think him less or more of a man if she knew that all he had thought of since the first moment they’d met was one Sergeant Kee Smith? And not just her amazing physique.

  Even if she wouldn’t admit it, he knew better. He didn’t know how, but he would place a long-odds wager on the first horse race at Saratoga Springs that there were greater depths to Kee Smith than the average male perceived. More than her amazing body and her right-left punch of attitude. Perhaps more than she knew herself.

  Dilya looked up to see where his attention had strayed. Her sharp eyes picked Kee out of the shadow. She left the string hanging between his hands, halfway between two figures, grabbed up the stuffed cat he’d given her, and sprinted across the burning sand toward Kee.

  The string game they had been playing for almost an hour now hung lifeless and snarled about his fingers.

  The girl launched herself at Kee, who caught her in a fierce hug.

  And as Kee spun Dilya about until her feet lifted from the ground, she moved from shadow to sunlight. And in the direct light he could see a look on Kee’s face, not of joy, though that was present, but of sadness. Almost terror. She was holding the girl so tight, he half feared Kee would hurt her. Then Kee plopped her down and, with a friendly slap on her butt, sent the girl scooting off for the chow line.

  Archie watched himself, with more than a little surprise, rise to his feet and move to stand beside Kee. They both looked into the tent’s shadows where the little
girl dodged around Big John’s bulk to grab a sandwich.

  “She loves you.”

  Kee jumped as if he’d electrocuted her. Why did he never do anything right?

  Kee looked up at him, her eyes wide. The terror back tenfold in those deep, dark eyes. A terror so deep he could imagine no method powerful enough to wash it away.

  Kee’s voice was a whisper. “You’re good with her. You’re a good man, Professor.”

  Now it was his turn to be surprised. It was an assessment that few had offered outside his sister and Major Emily Beale.

  “Thank you for Dilya’s sake.” She hooked a finger in the collar of his T-shirt and pulled him down.

  “This,” she kissed one cheek, “is for your kindness. This,” she kissed the other, “is for saving me when I blanked at that awful refugee camp.” And “This,” she kissed him softly on the lips.

  This.

  Archie had never tasted anything like Kee Smith’s kiss. She was the scent of a dusky sunset and the taste of abandon. He didn’t know what to do. As all the devils and gods were his witnesses, he didn’t know. He stood riveted in place by the lips of a woman who barely stood to his shoulder.

  When she moved back, just an inch, he almost stumbled forward onto her. Her almond eyes were wide, as wide as they had been moments before, but there was no terror.

  No. If he had to define that particular expression, he’d be forced to identify it as wonder. And then, impossibly, a deep blush roared up her face.

  Had he a mirror handy, he would define his own expression as shock. This pint-sized warrior, more beautiful than the most perfect windup doll, had decided to turn his entire world on its ear.

  When he blinked and shook his head to clear his thoughts, to clear the mesmerizing trace of warmth that lingered on his lips, Kee no longer stood before him. How long had he been standing in the sun?