Chapter 6

6

He couldn't decide if Fin was a lunatic or simply enjoyed messing with him. Then he thumbed the control to change the view projected inside his visor. One of the most amazing features of the bird was an all-around external camera. He could look in any direction and see the surroundings as if he sat in mid-air with no helo wrapped around him, all in fully enhanced night vision.

They were the lead bird on tonight's mission, but they weren't alone. A Direct-Action Penetrator, the gunship version of their Black Hawk, flew two rotor diameters behind them. The tiny two-person MH-6 Little Birds flew to either side, making a tight diamond formation.

He'd flown his search-and-rescue bird into several tight situations with a couple of Marine Corps Cobra gunships watching his back. But it hadn't felt like this. These four birds were so close together and in such perfect sync that they'd look like a single radar blip—if they weren't so heavily masked for stealth. And just like Fin, they all flew a bare three meters above the wavetops rolling along the Gulf of Aden.

He flipped back to the tactical view.

"How can you make sense of this?" What he could only describe as cacophony danced across the inside of his visor. Their familiarization flight had been about handling the bird. Not handling the tsunami of data.

Now?

He could interpret only the tiniest bit of the display at a time.

There lay the ocean and the Djibouti shore actually below the watery horizon, in the wireframe view anyway. Flying with the wheels at three meters, put their heads at about five. That placed the theoretical Earth horizon at eight kilometers with perfect seeing. At night, broken up by waves and haze, perhaps five klicks. They were twenty klicks out, so the wireframe outline of the low shoreline weirdly lay below the water horizon on his visor. Over top of all that was projected the night-vision view, which looked like what it was—a whole lot of water.

None of that was the problem.

Superimposed in the center was navigation information. Down the left, engine status. And down the right, a whole lot of blanks under the heading Weapons. They could fit missiles, auto-cannons, and other nastiness, but right now they were rigged as a transport bird, with the only weapons being the two side-facing Miniguns in the hands of the two crew chiefs seated behind them. But projected across the top was all the data about incoming threats (none at the moment), and the bottom showed defensive capability status (full loads of chaff and flares), and…who knew what all.

"Oh, sorry. Select the third option on the menu display."

He did, and three-quarters of the noise went away or dimmed out until needed. "Do you actually use that other setting?"

"Using it now. It's a learned skill," Fin said, as if splitting your brain into a dozen pieces was somehow normal.

He knew what to do with Finella. Even had some ideas about Fin, some definite ideas. Captain Hyland was a damned mystery. "What are we headed into?"

"Be nice if we knew that bit, wouldn't it?"

"Are we under-briefed?" He'd once had a commander who never provided sufficient information, and how their crews had survived those fiascos was more miracle than luck.

"No." She swung north to avoid a small boat by several kilometers, which brought a big cargo ship into distant view. Hopefully the Yemeni weren't targeting it.

Their actions had emptied the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Nine-tenths of the Suez traffic was now circling the Cape of Good Hope at the south tip of Africa. That added about two weeks to their passage and increased transit costs by half again. Supply lines all over Europe and the Eastern US were shredding daily, all because of a bunch of yahoos armed with Iranian rockets and a corrupted view of the Koran.

"We were briefed with all they know. You'll see. Think more about flexibility than hard-and-fast plans. We know that the best plans never survive first contact with the enemy."

"Eisenhower?"

"Field Marshal von Moltke. As shortened by Rommel ninety years later." Fin swung them back toward their original course. It was nice to know the bookworm Finella was still in there—somewhere.

A quick peek at the camera view showed the others flying seamlessly in formation as if they truly were one bird.

"Personally," she continued as if they were chatting over a shared banana split at Mountainside Cones, "I prefer the Sun Tzu quote: Plans are like a great river that maintains its course but adjusts its flow. Both formed and formless. We're trained to continuously adapt to the situation."

As if that wasn't what he'd been doing for the entirety of the last two hours. Two hours? A mere hundred and twenty minutes ago, he hadn't seen Fin Hyland in fourteen years. He'd never actually flown with the Night Stalkers. His helo would still be perched on the Peleliu's upper deck. Except that was flexibility by need, not by training. Just how different were he and Fin now? Had their paths drifted irrevocably apart?

"Grab your shorts."

Last time he'd heard her say that they'd been scooting buck naked out the back Daddy's hay loft. They'd fallen asleep in each other's arms and been woken by the farm hands arriving to muck the stalls and milk the cattle. He'd almost left his underwear lying on top of the first bales they'd soon be tossing down to the cows. He could hear the smile in her voice.

At the memory? Or?—

Forty minutes from the Peleliu, she carved such a hard turn for the coast that the main rotor must be under a meter from slicing into the waves. When she leveled out, he'd swear that her wheels would be breaking the wavetops, if they hadn't been raised. Unlike any other Black Hawk, the Stealth Hawk had retractable gear to cut down on its radar signature.

He realized that his butt was clenched so tight he probably didn't need the five-point harness to remain pinned to his seat.

Efforts to relax failed miserably.

"Thanks for the heads-up," he said as if that's exactly what she'd given him. He was not going to screw up flying with the Fin. Now that he'd had a taste of this world, would he ever be happy flying in his mere Seahawk again? Maybe not.

A glance aft, the two Killer Egg Little Bird helos hadn't taken the turn. The DAP Hawk now hung half a kilometer off their tail. No longer the lead—they were now on their own?

"What did I miss?"

"Sorry. It's a trained maneuver we call a Rock Killer."

Now that she mentioned it, he recalled hearing the phrase go by during the briefing. They had their own shorthand.

"I forgot that it wouldn't mean anything to you. No one's sure of the origin, but the scuttlebutt is a hot-shot Night Stalker, on a hairy-as-facing-the-Whiney Point Eagles mission, shot up a whole ridgeline of innocent rocks over there so that the enemy's attention wasn't aimed where the action is. Basic distraction—Night Stalkers style—we call it a Rock Killer."

"But they're stealth so?—"

At that moment, the sky behind them lit up with gunfire. Infrared tracers glowed bright in his night vision. Not just in the sky, but well up in it. High enough to be easily visible to the Chinese base and definitely to any of their patrol boats. The gunfire was directed east, as if an attack might be coming from Yemen, but he'd bet it wasn't. The Little Birds were making a big show of killing waves. Being stealth, no radar would discern who or how, but it would draw everyone's attention aloft—away from their lone bird.

Go on, folks. Watch the show. While their Stealth Hawk rolled up to the beach three kilometers west of the Chinese base.

No Fast Ropes, they weren't high enough for that. With her wheels still up, Fin slid over the waves and onto the beach. If there'd been a kid's sandcastle, she'd have smoothed it flat without ever touching the beach itself.

Both side doors of the cargo bay slammed open and the oppressive night heat rolled into the cabin along with all the coastline smells that never reached the Peleliu. Seaweed, salt of spray from the small waves breaking on the fine sand or stirred up by the big main rotor, and beach sand pumping a day's scorching heat back into the cooling night sky.

And she never stopped. Swung over the beach in a smooth arc, and six D-boys tumbled out three to a side. By the time she finished her arc and was again feet-wet over the waves, he couldn't see any sign of them. Another thing he never got to witness from his Seahawk.

"Well…damn!" He breathed a sigh once they were again five kilometers out and three meters up. "Or am I peaking too soon?"

"Don't recall that as being a problem."

He felt the heat rise to his face, even though he saw they were on a Pilots-only channel. "Some women are worth taking the time with."

"Well, take your time enjoying this. For now we circle very quietly. Up to you to make sure we don't stumble on any patrol boats or big ships. Go to Option Five on your visor controller. We have two hours until the scheduled pickup, but we have to remain within ten minutes in case of an emergency evac."

He changed his view. It took only a moment to pick out what was going on. Somewhere high above them, Kara Moretti was flying her unmanned, or rather unwomanned, drone. It offered a precise map of all the shipping in the area, probably all the way down to canoe-sized. He realized that Fin had been using that map to plan her approach to the coast in ways he'd never been aware of.

As they circled one way and dodged another, it was like they were walking backward through layered time.

First, they each traced their military careers through ranks from present day to boot camp. They followed that right back through college and her move, turning aside only as they reached that fateful prom night.

Next, they'd traded stories of particularly memorable flights. Not the classified missions, but tracking through how they'd each discovered rotorcraft then exploring why which birds were their favorites. Fin drove a Prius and he a Ford Ranger pickup; since flying exotic birds neither of them had needed exotic vehicles.

Mirroring the wending path which kept them close offshore but out of sight, they ducked as carefully into relationships.

"What the hell, Fin?"

"No one over six months," she repeated. "The Army?—"

"No, don't go blaming that on the service. Why, Fin? I mean…you're awesome." And why had he said that? One moment he knew her so well, but the next she was a complete stranger. Finella the bookish Irish girl he knew; Fin the warrior had no place in his experience.

She was so long in answering that he had time to wonder if she ever would.

"I…don't know. There was always so much to do, so much to learn. With the 101st I was mainly in the Dustbowl of Iraq and Afghanistan, but that all ended about the time I came on board with the Night Stalkers. You wouldn't believe the places I've flown with them."

"Is that what you did with all those books you were always reading?"

"Go traveling in my head? Maybe. Never thought about it that way but…maybe. Or it could be that's where I got the traveling bug. Half my leave is to go see my folks, but the other half is to travel somewhere I've never been before."

He focused back on their wandering course over the Gulf of Aden—so empty without the constant line of ships headed for Suez. His path had been far more linear. His college freshman roommate, who'd become his best friend over four years of rooming together, had come from a long line of Navy service. They'd signed up the day after graduation. Mickey now disappeared for six months at a time as an engineer on boomer submarines. He was also on his third wife and hundredth girlfriend.

Tom had stumbled into helos, working his way up to, ironically, being a sub-hunter for the big carriers. Because nothing and no one on a carrier served merely one purpose, he also flew resupply, SAR operations, and anything else the Navy needed. But his specialty had been sub-hunting. He'd even caught Mickey's boomer during a major exercise, much to the Navy's chagrin. His reassignment to the Peleliu had come through so soon afterward that he'd assumed that the Navy was punishing him for proving a weakness of their stealthiest boats. A boomer was called that because it carried a nuclear arsenal that potentially made very loud booms, not because the sub itself made much noise at all.

Punishment or not, tonight made a welcome adventure. He looked over at Fin, a very welcome one.

He'd never flown a mission like this one. A whole new world had opened up before him. What if the Peleliu posting had been a sign of Command's commendation rather that con dem nation?

And the next thought came easily. What if running into Fin wasn't chance but opportunity? Perhaps in multiple ways.

What if?—

"Grab your shorts!" Fin called out.

At least this time he was ready when she sliced back toward the coast.