Bring On the Dusk

Chapter 1-2

A long table sported a variety of laptops, and a pair of file cabinets stood at one end. They hadn’t counted on that at all. This was supposed to be a training camp, not an operations center.

They were going to need more help to take advantage of the new situation.

Michael got on the radio.

“USS Peleliu. This is Captain Casperson in Little Bird…” She didn’t know the name of the bird. She read off the tail number from the small plate on the control panel. “Inbound from a hundred kilometers at two-niner-zero.”

She didn’t want to sneak up on a ship of war that could shoot her down at this distance if they were in a grouchy mood.

“Roger that, Captain. Status?”

“Flying solo, full fuel.”

“In your armor?”

“Roger that.” Why in the world would they… Training. They’d want to make sure she wasn’t ignoring her training. Kid stuff. She’d flown Cobra attack birds for the US Marines for six years before her transfer and spent two more years training with the Night Stalkers. She wasn’t an—

“This is Air Mission Commander Archie Stevens.” A different voice came on the air. “Turn immediate heading three-four-zero. Altitude five-zero feet, all speed. You’ll be joining a flight ten miles ahead of you for an exfil. We can’t afford to slow them down until you make contact, so hustle.”

She slammed over the cyclic control in her right hand to shift to the new heading.

Okay, maybe not so much a training test.

Exfil. Exfiltration. A ground team needed to be pulled out and pulled out now. Something she’d never done in a Marine Corps gunship, but she’d practiced it in a hundred drills. Keep calm and her voice should sound that way. She expected that it didn’t.

“Uh, Roger.” Claudia had dozed fitfully for six hours in the last three days, and most of that had been in a vibrator seat on the roaring C-2 Greyhound. No rest for the weary.

Once on the right heading, she dove into the night heading for fifty feet above the ocean waves and opened up the throttles to the edge of the never-exceed speed of a hundred and seventy-five miles per hour.

The adrenaline had her wide awake before she reached her flight level.

Fifteen minutes later, Claudia rolled up behind a flight of three birds moments before they crossed over the beach and into Yemen. The FLIR night-vision gear painted an image across the inside of her helmet’s visor of two Little Birds and a Black Hawk.

No, it wasn’t a Black Hawk, it was a DAP—a Direct Action Penetrator, the nastiest gunship ever launched into the sky.

Well, weren’t they going to have fun tonight. One of the Little Birds was the attack version; that’s the one she wanted. The other was a transport like the one she was flying.

Odd. Neither the DAP nor the attack Little Bird showed up on her radar as more than signal noise, though the transport Little Bird did. It was as if they weren’t there, but she could see them. No time to think about it now.

“Captain Casperson”—a female voice—“take right flank off Merchant. You’ll be taking the southeast corner of a one-story building. Merchant, you’ll take the team from off the northwest. May, expect the LZ to be hot, especially near Merchant, so be ready to suppress it hard.”

Merchant must be the other transport Little Bird, so she moved up into formation beside it. The pilot waggled his bird side-to-side to wave hello. She answered in kind. Nice to be welcome despite being the late arrival to the party.

Whoever was giving the orders was pilot in command, not the remote Air Mission Commander. The only female DAP pilot she knew of was Chief Warrant Lola Maloney. There were only five women in SOAR, but Claudia hadn’t tried to keep track of them. She’d purposely tried not to. They were in combat and she’d been in training, so by ignoring them, she’d felt freer to simply drive herself to be her absolute best. She was used to making her own way, had been doing it since she was a kid.

Still, now that she’d made it, it might be nice to have another woman in the same company she was going to.

She hadn’t much thought about that.

Claudia was only the sixth woman of SOAR, fifth now that Major Emily Beale had retired. She’d applied for the 5th Battalion, D Company, because in a regiment as elite as SOAR, the 5D was still rumored to be the best. That was her kind of team. That she’d landed the assignment was daunting. That she’d have to prove she was up to it in the next ten minutes? Claudia was good with that.

They crossed over the beach, dropped down to twenty-five feet, and began following the ups and downs of the dry, rolling terrain. No need to talk; it was merely what Night Stalkers did.

The moment that Michael heard the faintest beat of an approaching helicopter, he whispered into his radio the same word he’d spoken twenty-four hours ago when they’d jumped out of an airplane at thirty-five thousand feet.

“Go.”

They had less than sixty seconds; it was all they should need.

He and Bill rose.

His first silenced shot punched a hole through the window glass. The second took out the overhead lamp, plunging the southeast room into darkness. They dove through the window in unison as they pulled down their night-vision goggles.

There was the low boom of a breaching charge removing the building’s front door—must have been locked. Security patrols would have left the front team no time to pick it. The other two operators were tasked with clearing the remaining five rooms and securing the rest of the building.

The soft double-spit of suppressed gunfire coming down the hallway said that at least one person had been elsewhere inside the building. They were dead now.

Michael managed to kick six of the rifles aside before the al-Qaeda leaders could react. Bill, who was standing back to give him cover, shot the seventh in the arm and the eighth in the head, twice. Abu Nassir Wafi, a lead trainer, was down. He was the toughest fighter and the least important asset in the room. The double tap to the head was a good choice.

After a brief scuffle, they had the seven remaining men gagged, with zip ties around their wrists and ankles. They lifted and threw each tied man out through the shattered window. The last of them grunted through their gags as they landed atop one another.

Bill pulled a short roll of heavily reinforced black garbage bags out of a pouch along his pants’ calf—a trick that the SEALs hadn’t learned before the bin Laden raid. Word was that they’d wasted valuable time scrounging old gym bags to cart out the intel they’d found inside Osama’s fortress. He and Bill began dumping laptops and files into the bags.

The birds were close overhead. He could hear the helicopters’ rotor roar drowning out the near-constant fire from the front of the building, the quiet double spit of the Delta operators’ HK416s echoing down the hall, and the sharp barks of AK-47s wielded by the terrorist trainers out in the compound. Delta now controlled the inside of the building and was using it as a stronghold against attack.

“All evac on southeast side,” he told the helos. He didn’t need to tell the other two operators to fall back to join them in the southeast room. They’d know to do that as soon as they were ready.

He emptied the last file drawer and tossed the sack on top of the struggling al-Qaeda leaders.

He and Bill jumped over the sill, not taking much care about who they landed on.

The other two operators followed them out, moments before a large detonation shook the building and blew fire out the window inches above their heads.

The inside team had left a booby trap in the weapons’ store. The building was now secure—the entire inside was engulfed in flames.

The landing zone was a total s**t storm, exactly like a typical training scenario except this time the bad guys were trying to kill the good guys with live rounds instead of Simunitions.

The air was thick with the hail of small-arms fire as Claudia swung her helo wide to clear the streamers of fire that punched out the windows of the building to all sides. She settled as close as she dared beside the southeast wall of the building.

Merchant threw up a world of dust as it dropped in beside her.

Two men came running toward them, but she could see the small infrared patches on their shoulders that identified them as friendlies so she kept her hands on the controls. No need to grab for her weapon. They were also each carrying large heavy sacks. The bigger guy—and he was way big and broad-shouldered—headed for Merchant.

The smaller man tossed his bag on top of her own gear in the rear and returned to the group of bound men on the ground.

Two more friendlies moved to squat at the corners of the building and were laying down cover fire against anyone who tried to circle around the building to the helicopters. Anyone remaining out in the compound had the two gun platforms circling above to keep them occupied.

There was the harsh roar of a Minigun sluicing down three thousand rounds a minute, interrupted by the harsh sizzle of rockets and matching explosions moments later.

For now, they were in a quiet bubble behind the shield of the building, but it would only last another few seconds.

Claudia let go of the controls and took up her weapon to guard for approaches over the desert.

The big guy-little guy team moved to cut the prisoners’ feet loose in pairs. They hustled their prisoners onto Merchant’s bench seats, tied them in place, and shot each with a tranquilizer injection into their necks. In moments, they had four tied and slumped bad guys on Merchant’s benches. The two friendlies who’d been working guard at the corners of the building clambered onto Merchant and the bird dusted off. The two soldiers continued providing cover from their positions aloft.

The other two soldiers started her way, herding the last three prisoners.

On a quick sweep, she spotted a figure running toward them over a low dune beyond the camp.

No “friendly” infrared tags on the man’s shoulder, and his weapon was up. She popped the safety and unleashed a three-shot burst. He cried out and fell to the ground.

By the time she turned back, they had the prisoners tied on and drugged out. The big guy sat on an outside bench close by her right elbow and the smaller one slipped into her empty left-hand copilot seat.

At his nod, she was aloft, low, and racing directly away from the gun battle still roaring across the compound—the two attack helos and the armed terrorists going at one another.

Claudia knew it would be a one-sided battle. There was a reason that Death Waits in the Dark was one of the Night Stalkers’ mottos.

She crested a dune and spotted an outlier guard in her infrared night vision. Someone lying on the back of the dune face, spread-eagled and holding a weapon.

“Shooter!” she called out. She needed both hands on the controls, and this wasn’t a gunship; she had no weapon other than the one hanging across her chest.

As she spun to give the man in the copilot’s seat a better angle, he twisted in his seat and fired downward through the open door—two shots so close together that they practically sounded like one.

The man turned back, not bothering to watch the results of his effort.