Light Up the Night

Chapter 1-1

1

Chief Warrant 2 Trisha O’Malley waited ten kilometers off the north coast of Somalia for the mission Go! moment. She held her AH-6M Little Bird attack helicopter at wave height, exactly at wave height. The long metal skids were being licked clean by the rolling crests heading ashore from the Gulf of Aden. She’d dare any radar system to try and sort her out from the surface clutter.

Through the large openings to either side of the tiny cockpit where the doors could be hung, the smell of the hot night ocean wafted thick with salt from the sea and bitter from the dust blown off the achingly dry land. Nobody flew a Little Bird with the doors on. She didn’t know why they were ordered in the first place. The only time they were used was to protect the birds when they were parked in harsh environments; a piece of plastic could do that. When they flew, the doors were off. Having them off added freedom of movement in the tiny cockpit, and far more importantly, the visibility was much better.

Not that visibility was such a big deal at the moment. Outside the forward glass-and-polycarbonate windscreen, which reached from below her foot pedals to above her head—one of many things Trisha liked about the Little Birds—was nothing but impenetrable darkness. The console swept up between the pilots’ seats but was confined to a narrow column on the front windscreen that stopped below eye level.

Flying an AH-6M “Killer Egg” was as close to flying with nothing between the pilot and the sky as existed. No door beside her and bullet-resistant protection from below her feet to farther back than she could tilt her head while wearing a helmet. Everything a girl needed for a good time.

The console itself was dominated by a pair of LCD multifunction screens that could be switched at the tap of a button,q from engine performance to weather radar to digital terrain map. It made her feel like those science fiction movie heroes in superpowered suits, as if instead of flying a helo, she herself was wearing a weaponized suit that happened to be in the shape of a helicopter.

Nothing of interest at the moment. Her night-vision gear projected infrared images from the cameras mounted on the outside of the helo onto the inside of her helmet’s visor. Nothing ahead, except more waves.

To her right hovered the DAP Hawk Vengeance with Chief Warrant 3 Lola Maloney commanding, and beyond that Dusty James’ transport Black Hawk, the Vicious. To Trisha’s left, if Chief Warrant 2 Roland Emerson weren’t sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with her in his copilot seat, she’d be able to see the two other Little Birds of her flight formation, Mad Max and Merchant of Death—Max and Merchant for short.

When she’d named her bird May, everyone thought it was a stupid woman joke. But any fool who teased her about it being the Merry Month of…or Mayfly soon learned that it was short for Mayhem. She never had to explain it twice.

Tonight, the mission Go had been given fifteen minutes earlier when they’d spun up their rotors and departed the USS Peleliu amphibious assault ship floating forty miles out in the Arabian Sea. No need for risking that extra scrap of encrypted communication.

Now ten seconds to start of mission, she wound up on the throttle in her left hand. At five seconds to Go! both the bird and Trisha’s body were humming with the need to get moving.

The clock on her dash hit 0300 hours—and she was gone. The May didn’t fly, she leapt. Not like a racehorse, like a greyhound. With the collective full up and the cyclic forward, Trisha was tilted nose down two meters above the waves and a hundred meters in the lead of any other bird in the flight, right where she liked to be. They closed formation quickly, but she liked setting a higher standard especially on this, her first operational flight. It had been two long years of training, and she was way past ready.

Despite the low-noise blades and engine baffles, the roar inside the craft was loud enough that there wouldn’t be much conversation without a headset. It was doable, but your voice would get tired fast. Despite the full-enclosure helmet, she could feel the familiar beat of the machine and whine of the high-speed turbine engine against her body.

Everything in tune and running true. Sounded like an idea for a song, not that she could write music.

Oh-three-hundred should be the sleepiest moment on the Somali coast. Intelligence said the guard change was at oh-four-hundred. Everyone else should be asleep.

Everyone except the Night Stalkers of the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (airborne). SOAR(a) ruled the night, the most elite helicopter team in any military.

Tonight they’d be ruling the northern coastal town of Bosaso, Somalia, on the Horn of Africa. Or at least one corner of it. They wouldn’t be engaging within the third largest city in the country, because the pirates had made the mistake of holding their hostages at a compound outside of town. The local authorities were clamping down hard on piracy and, perhaps for public image’s sake alone, they wouldn’t have been as tolerant of the pirates if they were right in town.

She’d expected to feel serious nerves. It was her first mission-qualified flight for the Night Stalkers. She’d spent five years with the 101st Airborne flying Apache Longbow attack helos. On the day she hit the five-year minimum-experience requirement, she’d planned to walk across Fort Campbell and knock on the 160th’s locked gate for an application. Instead, an invitation to apply had been waiting for her that very morning.

Trisha smiled at the memory of that. Her old friend Major Beale had kept track of her despite roaring up the officer ranks. Trisha hadn’t West Pointed in, though she could have. Instead she’d made her parents crazy by taking the NYU education that she’d paid for herself, then enlisting and bucking her way up from private. Though stepping back to the basics of Warrant Office Candidate School after she’d been serving for several years had been tough.

The school of the hard way had served her for every step of her life and she wasn’t changing that now. She’d no more climb up the broad ladder of her father’s political heft than she would clamber up the lace-draped tiers of her mother’s social one.

Two more years had passed since she’d been accepted to SOAR. Trisha had been used to leading entire flights and planning operations for the Screaming Eagles. Not so with the Night Stalkers. They’d spent two years showing her how little she knew. By the time they were done, she was glad to be allowed to fly with them at all.

“One klick,” Roland said over the headset. She and Roland were the same rank, though he’d been in a year longer than she had. He was there in case she f****d up.

No! Trisha admonished herself. He was there as her copilot. If he were there to cover for her, she’d be in the left seat and he’d be in the right-hand pilot position. All they both cared about was doing this mission and doing it right.

One kilometer out. Thirteen seconds to shore.

On cue, the breakwater came into view. A massive pile of car-sized concrete blocks protected the small harbor from storms coming in off the Arabian Sea. But it wasn’t ready for the storm that the Night Stalkers could unleash.

Navy SEAL Lieutenant William Bruce squatted in the dust, wearing the standard clothes of a mercenary soldier looking for a quick buck by joining the Somali pirates. Bill wore camo pants, a dark tank-tee, and a black sweatband. He carried a battered but immensely serviceable M-16, which marked him clearly as a merc for bringing his own weapon with him.

Most pirates wielded out-of-date Russian crap, some of it from all the way back to WWII, that was as likely to explode in their hands as to actually fire. He had a Russian TT-30 semi-auto pistol in the back of his waistband, a reliable enough weapon though he preferred a Sig Sauer, spare magazines in his thigh pouches, and a rusting but sharp hunting knife strapped to his thigh. He fit right in.

Bill checked his watch. Oh-three-hundred sharp.

The helos should be here in three minutes, if they were to be trusted. There was a laugh. A decade in the Navy, the last five years as a SEAL, and he still didn’t trust the Night Stalkers. He should try to get over it, but he didn’t see that happening anytime soon. They were dead reliable, anywhere on the planet, any time. But this was Somalia, and though it wasn’t their fault, he couldn’t help himself. He would never trust anyone on Somali soil.

Well, the time was now or never, and he’d have to bank on them actually showing up and doing it right. He slid up behind Abshir, the night guard assigned to the hostages taken in their latest successful piracy, and dropped him with a hard chop to the neck. He could have come from the front, Abshir knew him, but Bill didn’t want to risk his undercover role being identified. Nor was Bill willing to kill the man in cold blood simply to protect his identity.

The local warlord, Mahan, would probably have the man shot for failing his guard duty, but that would be his choice. It wouldn’t be any great loss to the world. Abshir was a nasty piece of work with a strain of cruelty deeper than even the most hardened pirates possessed.

Bill slipped into the low building holding most of the prisoners, dragging Abshir with him. Let Mahan think that the prisoners had overpowered the guard.

All of the male hostages were asleep. No one on watch. No one waiting for the least opportunity to escape. It showed how easily civilians became dispirited, and this was only the second week of their captivity.

He began waking them quietly. At first they’d thought he was attacking them, and he lost thirty seconds convincing them they were about to be rescued. The boat’s owner, Wilkin something Junior, was the slowest of the bunch. Senator’s son. No one ever said he was a bright bulb, merely rich and related to the right man to require an immediate rescue. Who would name their kid Wilkin anyway? And Junior was salt in the wound, like the father hadn’t learned from being stuck with the tag himself.

Eleven, six passengers and five crew, taken off the hundred-and-fifty-foot pleasure yacht Gracie in the Arabian Sea. The same number of SEALs that fit in a twenty-two-foot rubber boat along with all of their gear.

What the i***t yachties were doing out there alone in the constricted throat of the Gulf of Aden, he didn’t want to know. Anyone transiting the Suez with half a clue on board would wait for a military escort convoy before braving the waters between Somalia and Yemen. The Somali coast was one of the four most dangerous stretches of water on the planet, and they’d gone sightseeing. Probably on their way to explore the Straits of Malacca off Indonesia next. There they wouldn’t be hostages, they’d just be robbed or dead if they resisted at all.

He knew the civilians would take another minute or two to get their acts together, so he told them to stay silent and be ready. They hadn’t asked about the women of their crew yet, a crime that made him think the men were the ones he shouldn’t bother rescuing.

Bill slid out the door and moved in the darkest shadows of the moonless night, tight against the adobe walls on the right side of the street. At the last doorway before the cross street, he turned in. The three women yachties had been separated from the others and were tied to beds. So no guard. They were battered and bruised, but he was pretty sure that they’d only been mishandled, not raped. It had taken a risk, but he’d convinced Mahan that unless he wanted serious retribution after they were ransomed off, he’d better not let his men make a holiday of the ladies.