Chapter 1

1

"Hey, Fin. Get your butt in gear." Frank Stick Stokman stood a foot taller than herself, even if she hadn't been sitting down—and way into her personal space. Guy just had no clue.

"Don't give me any ideas." Captain Finella Hyland raised her book, facing the cover toward Stick. This edition of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Rising included Hannibal Lecter's greedy eyes looking out from the steel prison mask. The mask covered Lecter's mouth and chin so that he couldn't bite off anyone's face, though the chances of getting Stick to hear this Back off! message weren't great.

The old saying, you can't keep a good woman down, needed an update for Stick; you must put that annoying man down. In fact, she'd be glad if someone extended that concept across much of the male population. Most were far too convinced of their own mandate as God's chosen gender—Stick would gladly be their self-proclaimed king. Thank goodness she outranked him. She was also Irish, which put mere mortals at a distinct disadvantage. Thanks for that, Great Grandma! The first Hyland to cross the ocean to North America.

Besides, she had far more pressing problems than Stick.

First and foremost, the two of them had been shipped thirty hours from the primary Night Stalkers base in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to land on a warship floating off the Horn of Africa. More, she knew that the USS Peleliu had been decommissioned a decade ago—yet inexplicably here they were. The barely audible thrum of the engines said they weren't doing much more than station keeping. But time would answer that shortly and one thing being an Army pilot had taught her was patience.

Her second problem, still more pressing that Stick, was this book—he ranked as merely annoying. She wasn't bothered by Hannibal's origin story, even though she wouldn't count herself as a horror fan. But it was the only book dumped in the corner of the pilots' ready room that she hadn't read.

She'd just finished Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. She'd finally gotten around to reading that because Mom had been an ex-pat schoolteacher in South Africa for thirteen years before she returned to North America and became, well, Mom. Mom and her job managing an apartheid-era schoolgirl field-hockey team was hard to imagine. However, that the team had been good enough to travel throughout South Africa also said plenty about the genes Mom had passed down to Fin—be the best.

No, the problem with Hannibal Rising lay far deeper than Stick's shallow brain could ever delve—it was a prequel. Written last but set before the other three books in the series. Whenever she stumbled on a series written out of order, the quandary emerged: read it in chronological order or written order? No sign of the others in the tiny dump-off library that the flight crews left for one another. Well, that answered that question, but she was never comfortable with it. Besides, she was committed now; once she started a series, she always had to finish it.

She read another paragraph to annoy Stick; turnabout was fair play after all, before giving him any of her attention. "What's your problem, Stick? Not getting enough roughage in your diet?"

"Hey, I eat both essential food groups: steak and potatoes. Biscuits too when I'm cornered."

She fought back the smile. He consistently overreacted to even the tiniest sliver of encouragement; not a chance it would be coming from her. Still, she liked funny, just not on Stick.

"We've got a briefing for our familiarization flight in ten and a pre-mission brief in an hour," he prompted, as if she was the dense one.

Finella raised her left eyebrow at him in question.

"So, get yourself ready already."

She sighed. One of the many problems with Stick? He wasn't the most observant of guys. He was a good enough gunner and copilot…in the air. Out of the cockpit, he ranked bottom five in situational awareness, even if the other four contenders happened to all be Kens from the Barbie movie. "Where are we, Stick?"

"Pilot ready room," he offered in a seriously duh tone. To prove his point, he waved a hand at the comfortable chairs and big screen displays for briefings. That it was also the ship captain's Flight Deck level office simply made it weird. But what did she know about Navy ships; she was an Army helo pilot.

"And where are the briefings held?"

He squinted at her hard. He must really be out of it. Thirty hours transit from Stateside and eight hours in the sack, she was just fine. His brain must be running even slower than normal.

"And what am I already wearing?" she tried to give him a clue because that's what pilots did for their crew, even when they were being utter dweebs.

"Your flightsuit?"

"Perfect. So, logically, you're the one who's late because I'm already here and you're only just arriving. You're early, but I'm even earlier, so you're late by comparison." His eyes crossed at that. She decided to throw him a rescue line, "And what are you wearing?"

He looked down at his jeans and flannel shirt, like hick was an In Thing these days. "Well, shee-it." Said like the cowboy she knew he wasn't, but there was no accounting for people from Seattle.

"So, I'm not the one who needs to get his butt in gear. Get it together, Lieutenant. Now!" She let her command voice out to play. It always shocked folks coming from a five-foot-oh woman with real curves. Guys missed that she was Irish—well, Great Gran Finella had been, before she'd married a French-Canadian. But as her namesake, Fin owned it. Attitude came pre-packaged in her DNA. Thanks again, Great Gran.

Stick spun around to head down the ladder and go change. In the process, he banged his forehead hard on the top of the hatch—and plummeted to the deck. She could walk through standing tall; he missed by four inches. Halfway to laughing, she saw the blood.

Her call had the ship's medics on him in under two minutes. Scalp wound, so more blood than damage. Most of which she'd kept in place by pressing the pages of Hannibal Rising like a pressure bandage to his forehead to staunch the flow until the medics had arrived. He'd knocked himself out cold and didn't complain about having Hannibal Lecter shoved against his face, but it also put paid on her reading the blood-soaked book. When the medics offered to cart it away to be burned as hazardous medical waste, she didn't argue. Definite message there that horror was not one of her genres. Perhaps she'd take the hint and give her must-read-the-whole-series rule a pass. Just this one time. Seeing a bared section of Stick's skull before the blood had welled up was a little too close to the fiction that had staunched it.

Major Justin Roberts and the company's Air Mission Commander Kara Moretti arrived just as the medics were bundling Stick onto a stretcher.

"What did you do to your copilot, Captain Hyland?" Now that's what a cowboy should look like. Six-two of blond-and-blue Texan complete with a white Stetson who walked like he was still on his home prairie rather than a warship in unfriendly territory. Pity about the ring on his finger.

"Wish I could be the one to take credit for it, sir." She'd called for retribution upon annoying men but hadn't intended it to happen quite so punctually—or thoroughly. Had she developed a cool new superpower? "But the man attempted a much-needed lobotomy all on his own."

"Assessment?"

"Of what? How I'm going to do fly my first mission with the company shy a copilot?" She'd studied the listing of folks invited to the flight briefing. It didn't list any backup crew.

Justin glanced over at Kara Moretti. Kara stood four inches short of the cowboy, still towering over her. Where he was light, she was Italian dark in eye, skin, and thick brown hair. She was also his wife. Caught herself a pretty one. Fin had no interest in slowing down, not yet anyway, not even for one that looked like the major.

Kara asked the question. "Assessment of Lieutenant Stokman? You're both new to the company."

"Meaning we're unknowns. He's a weird mix, good enough to qualify in the air. On the ground…" she waggled a hand. Not so much. "Command deemed him good enough to meet SOAR standards though." She didn't want to down-talk a fellow pilot, especially not her own copilot.

But that was the bottom line. The helo pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment were the best in the world. However, inside that elite crowd, the companies of the 5th Battalion were a cut above. She'd been bucking for this seat since, maybe not junior high as she'd been too busy discovering boys, but not long after that. She'd gone Army straight out of college and focused her sights on the Night Stalkers as soon as she'd heard they were the best. Once there, the 5D became the next obvious target.

" Good enough doesn't cut it in this company." AMC Moretti's tone made it clear that she was the hard-ass of the outfit. Not what Finella had expected from the lovely brunette—though perhaps she should have after hearing the Brooklyn accent.

"I won't be the one to take him down." A girl didn't rat out her own copilot. "Long transit to get here. I slept. Don't know if he did." Special Operations taught you to sleep whenever / wherever you could because who knew when the next chance would be.

"Where'd he get his callsign?"

"Gave it to him myself."

"Stick? Why?"

Fin really didn't want to answer that.

Moretti rose to her toes, an Italian as ready to leap into battle as an Irishwoman. Fin liked that and braced herself, but it didn't seem like a good move on her first day in the company and managed to ease back. "Do you speak German, ma'am?"

Moretti and Roberts both shook their heads.

"Frank Stokman, literally Frank-Stubborn-man. Change S-t-o-k to S-t-o- c- k and you get the German for Stickman. Stick." She wouldn't mention that in medieval Middle High German it had meant Dunghill-man. She'd always kept that part of the joke to herself.

"As in dumb as a stick," Moretti sighed. "Sometimes I hate the guys back at command."

Command had kicked Fin halfway around the world to fly with the 5D. She had no complaints to file.

Roberts delivered a passel of that smooth Texas before this conversation got any worse for Stick.

"Let's table that discussion until medics clear him for flight, which definitely won't be in…" he glanced at his watch, "the next two minutes. We need a replacement."

Roberts and Moretti had welcomed them aboard, made sure they found their cabins, and left them to sack out after the long haul from Stateside. They'd insisted on an orientation flight before the night's mission, so at the moment the briefing included just her and two majors. The replacement better show up soon.

Finella had forgotten that much and arrived early to the briefing to meet her new teammates. But they'd only be getting up and eating breakfast now, which had explained why the chow line had been one person long when she'd passed through an hour too early.

"Kara, find out if we can borrow Digger," Major Roberts waved toward the door to the Peleliu's Flight Deck.

Kara yanked out her radio and headed through the heavy door into the deep twilight that shrouded the ship.

Arriving at dawn, Finella had only had a moment to see the big helicopter carrier. A smaller version of an aircraft carrier—without the catapults and wires for launching and catching jets—she still stretched over eight hundred feet long and a hundred wide. She could also launch hovercraft from her Well Deck down at sea level. In the old days, she could deliver a reinforced battalion of Marines complete with tanks and armored vehicles, along with twenty-odd helos and a handful of Harrier jump jets which could launch from the deck.

When they'd been ferried out from USAFRICOM's big base at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, there'd been a lone Navy Seahawk parked on the deck. As they'd stumbled down past the Hangar Deck headed for the living quarters, it had been less than half full of helos tucked back in the shadows. The rest of the space had been echoingly empty. The ship had a skeleton Navy crew and not a single Marine that she'd spotted. Roberts filled her in while they waited for Kara and this Digger to arrive.

"The USS Peleliu is technically decommissioned," Roberts explained. "Makes for a fine Spec Ops platform though. Elements of the 5D have been stationed aboard for the last decade."

Keeping an entire ship running to deliver this team to the world's trouble spots told her exactly what the Department of Defense thought of this company, and she wanted in. No, she was in. Now she'd stick fast.