Bring On the Dusk

Chapter 2-1

2

Michael rolled out of his bunk and gave the man his morning hundreds. First, through his hundred fingertip push-ups, he listened to the sounds of the ship. All quiet. The USS Peleliu flight operations were generally quiet through the day now.

He would not think of last night or the way she—

He did an extra fifty push-ups.

Maybe there’d at least be time to learn the pilot’s name.

An extra twenty-five.

It was supposed to be a quiet day after all.

Not so long ago, the Peleliu had seen both night and day operations. They were stationed off the coast of Somalia watching for pirates. Last summer the schedule had been hectic with a brutal operational tempo. Every night had been spent doing ocean sweeps to catch the small Somali raider craft heading for the shipping lanes. During the day they seemed to constantly be rushing to the rescue of ships under attack. Six other warships from various nations plied these waters, but they were spread over two million square miles of ocean along fifteen hundred miles of coast.

Now it was March. Six months after their focused strike retaking all of the northern ships and hostages in a single night, the Somali pirates had mostly folded up shop—at least in the north.

The pirates’ four main leaders were dead, two from in-fighting and two killed by Delta Force. Captain Bill Bruce was a D-boy now, so Michael would claim his kill as Delta, though he’d still been a SEAL at that time. It had taken six more months of cleanup raids and monitoring, but the area was now quiet. Not totally safe, but certainly not the hell of the last decade. Last night, EU NAVFOR had downgraded the northern region of Operation Atalanta to a maintenance stance. The southern region of the operation was another matter.

Through his hundred sit-ups, Michael began organizing his day, or rather his night, since that’s when they flew their missions. The Night Stalkers lived in a flipped-clock world, flying at night, sleeping during the day. The clock on the bulkhead wall told him it was only sixteen hundred—four in the afternoon. That meant he had time for a run on the USS Peleliu’s hangar deck before breakfast and the preflight briefing.

Maybe that would help shake the new pilot out of his system. And why was he fooling himself about that? Sure wasn’t going to be that easy.

The mission switchover in the north from fighting pirates to keeping them under reasonable control probably meant reassignment soon anyway, so he didn’t need to worry.

Michael had intentionally embedded himself as Delta liaison with the D Company of Special Operations Aviation Regiment’s 5th Battalion. They were the pinnacle, and he enjoyed working with them because they had the highest op-tempo in all of SOAR. They also had the highest mission-success rate. They never stayed in maintenance or sweep positions; the 5D always flew at the outer edge of the envelope.

If they ever did stagnate, he would have to move on. Part of being Delta was constant training, constant pushing to be ready no matter what came down the pipe. And part of being himself, he knew, was always finding the next impossible thing and conquering the hell out of it.

The 5D kept him challenged physically and mentally. Every day. They were the purest edge Michael could find.

How pure edge was the new pilot? She’d been good and steady last night. If that was fresh off training, it was a good sign. But last night’s mission had been more noisy than complex.

Something told him that she had plenty of edge, though. Less than thirty seconds past the outer boundary shooter, she was unraveling his jokes in a calm and smooth voice.

And that hair. The soft weight of it as it had spilled over his hands and—

Shit!

It had simply been too damned long since he’d hooked up with some friendly shore leave…wasn’t it?

After his sit-ups he rolled up off the steel deck and pulled on shorts, t-shirt, and running shoes. One of the advantages of being a colonel was having his own sink in his own room, even when visiting on a Navy ship. A quick shave then he was out the door and headed up to the hangar deck. He wore his black hair long but kept his face clean-shaven. Different SOF operators made different choices, but casual was the keyword. Spec Ops weren’t about uniforms; they were about blending in on an undercover mission.

The hangar on the Peleliu was an open space immediately below the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship. Essentially a small aircraft carrier, she presently boasted six SOAR helicopters on her deck. Her normal complement had been six Harrier Jump jets and twenty helos from moderate to the massive Sea Stallions.

That left the hangar space free to use as a quarter-mile running track except when they were rebuilding a shot-up bird. Then the mechanics would take over a bay at the far end of the deck and the track would run shorter for a time.

Climbing the ladder from the bunk deck below, he could tell the hangar was mostly clear. He tried not to run when the fifty Rangers hit the space for their two hours of PT. US Rangers were many things, but quiet wasn’t one of them, especially during physical training. They ran in packs and were always teasing and harassing each other. And they sang as they ran, shouting Ran-gers! every fifth lap. They could make the hangar-deck run actively painful with the echoes reverberating throughout the space.

At present he could tell there were only two heavy-footed runners and one lighter one by the echoes in the cavernous, gray steel space that towered three stories high. It was a mostly clear space two football fields long and the better part of one wide. He’d seen it packed with thirty aircraft folded and stowed shoulder-to-shoulder and crammed with service personnel when a reinforced battalion of Marines was aboard.

The Peleliu had been slated for retirement and decommissioning. When the Marines were done with her, SOAR had asked to use the old ship as a forward operations platform in Somali waters. In his judgment, which he’d reported to the Pentagon, the repurposing of the ship was an operational asset of the first order. With one quarter of the normal Navy personnel, she also wouldn’t be an overly expensive ship to keep in operation. After forty years at sea and not quite a year past her planned retirement, the old lady was still going strong.

The heat of the day in the Gulf of Aden was its normal moderately hot and intolerably humid. The setting sunlight poured in the large opening at the rear of the deck, which meant they were steaming east. By the motion of the ship, they were moving at eight knots, loafing along at one third of her full cruise speed.

That would be changing tonight after he spoke with the commander.

As he started stretching out, he automatically assessed the other three runners on the deck. A pair of SOAR early risers. Five p.m.—1700 hours—was their rise and shine, eighteen hundred meal, nineteen hundred briefing, and aloft thirty minutes later at full dark if there was an operation.

The third one—newly returned only last week from Delta training and his wedding and honeymoon—was his new assistant, Captain William Bruce.

Michael timed his stretches so that he’d be ready to run when Bill lapped by. He watched Bill approach. Delta training had shifted his stride despite his ten years in the Navy and spending half that time in the SEALs before Michael recruited him. There was an agility to Bill’s gait that he had lacked before. The SEAL training had made him a high-endurance mile-eater. The Delta regimen had added flexibility.

Michael did a final stretch on his left hamstring and began to trot in place. Three steps to get up to speed and he fell in close beside Bill without making him shift his stride. He smiled a good morning.

Trisha O’Malley, the SOAR Little Bird pilot who Bill had married, usually ran with him. She’d vocally refused to besmirch her Irish heritage with his Scottish name, allowing she was condescending to marry him to dilute the ultimate shame of his blood.

A nod to the space between them, where the small redhead would normally fit between them, asked the question.

“New flyer meet-and-greet.” Bill’s deep voice matched his big frame.

The Little Bird pilot.

He still didn’t know her name. Definitely have to fix that.

He also needed to fix how she was occupying so many of his thoughts despite that lack of a name.

With unspoken consent, he and Bill closed the space between them, then both kicked it up ten percent and began lapping the SOAR runners. Their own feet echoed much more lightly within the cavernous space than those of the flyers, despite their greater speed.

Captain Claudia Jean Casperson had been led to her new quarters last night and pitched facedown into her bunk. Whoever had guided her had been kind enough to turn off the light and close the door.

She only had been awake long enough to wash her face and unpack when there was a knock on the door.

A short redhead stood in the gray steel corridor. The woman was slight, freckled, pretty, and wearing full flight gear. Was this the woman who’d been on the radio last night from the DAP Hawk?

“Why aren’t you in your gear? C’mon. Suit up, newbie!” Different voice than on the radio. That meant there were two women in the 5th Battalion’s D Company. No insignia on her flight suit.

Unsure what to do, Claudia saluted.

“Cut that out! Damn it, don’t they teach you anything about forward theater of operations?”

A salute was so ingrained, and what did it matter in a pilot? Sure, grunts on the ground didn’t salute when in the field because that indicated who was in charge to an unfriendly sniper. But on a Navy ship she—

“No, I can see you thinking it. But no, not here. You can do that crap all you want on US soil, but that’s it from now on. Clear?”

“Uh, yes sir. Ma’am.”

Claudia knew better than to protest about being newly-landed or not having received orders to be battle ready. She simply turned to pull on the gear she’d stripped off less than twenty minutes before while the woman waited. In moments they were clambering up through the decks to reach the flight deck.

She knew this ship well. The eight hundred feet of the amphibious assault ship Peleliu were a Navy-gray haven afloat in the infinite blue of the ocean off the Horn of Africa—a desert far more barren than the central Arizona hills she’d grown up in.

Yet, it was strangely like coming home. Two years ago she’d departed these decks aboard a massive Sea Stallion helicopter—the largest bird in the US military—marking the last day of her final two-year tour as a Marine Corps pilot. And now that crazy lady named Fate had returned her to the same ship under a different branch of the service flying the MH-6M Little Bird, the military’s smallest helicopter.

All that mattered was that she’d finally made it. She’d been gunning to join SOAR since the day she saw that the first woman had made it three years before. If a Black Hawk pilot could make the jump, so could a Snake pilot. Only she’d do it better.

Jumping from a Marine Corps AH-1W SuperCobra “Snake” would have been a big step down if she’d gone standard Army. But to join the Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR—even the hardest-core Marines admitted they were exceptional—despite the obvious severe handicap of that SOAR was technically part of the Army and therefore should fall under the umbrella of disdain for all of the pitiful services who hadn’t made it to being Marines. Oorah!

When they arrived on deck, the heat slapped against her. The sun was lowering toward the horizon, but it was still a couple hours until sunset. The steel plating radiated with waves of heat that blurred the far ends of the ship, though it was only a hundred yards in either direction from where they’d emerged amidships.