Light Up the Night

Chapter 1-2

They were gagged, so he didn’t bother to wake them gently. They wouldn’t be making any noise. He slashed their bonds and had them stumbling ahead of him before they were fully conscious.

Just as he reached the first building to collect the rest of the men, he could hear the helos. The low thud of helicopters with quieting technology, sliding up to the beach. He’d only heard the stealth-rigged helos once before. It was a unique sound that he would have ignored if he didn’t already know it. Bill did his best not to be impressed that they were releasing those assets to any task less than taking out the next Osama bin Laden.

At least the Night Stalkers were punctual. Now if they could somehow resist being shot out of the sky.

Trisha checked her clock as they crossed the beach.

03:02:54, six seconds early. She liked being early.

That was one of the things the Night Stalkers had taught her. How to hit a mark within a thirty-second window, whether it was a thousand meters away or as many kilometers.

Also, no warm dots of infrared heat on her night vision that might be a flock of pelicans. Mission briefing had warned they traveled in large flocks along the Somali coast and could cause problems if you flew over one and spooked it aloft, especially at night.

Their appointed meeting place was by the large compound at the west edge of town. It stood separate from the hovels that littered the edges of Bosaso.

The center of town had mostly two- and three-story buildings, clumps of scrub grass, and a few carefully nursed palm trees around hotels and government buildings. Out here at the western edge of town any trees had long since gone to fuel cooking fires and any grass was dead. Not much survived the dry season that lasted, well, all frickin’ year. This place was dismal. Thorny acacia bushes, about the only thing that grew in the sandy orange soil, were called desert roses when they bloomed with multicolored windblown plastic debris.

April got them two of the five inches of rain that fell all year. It was September, and they were screwed. Dust was a major issue. So the Night Stalkers’ formation flew in side-by-side, instead of in a line, so that no one ate anyone else’s dust as they arrived over the land.

Thankfully, out at the edge of town where the hostages were supposedly being held, there were few power lines and most of the buildings were single story, a lot of tin roofs and a lot with no roof at all. So there was room to maneuver. Even in a brownout of dust beaten aloft by the helo’s rotor downwash, if she climbed ten meters up she’d be in the clear. At least from hitting any obstacles.

Early in the night, the tin of the roofs would have shown as bright square projections on the inside of her helmet’s visor because of the release of the sun’s heat. The ADAS camera gear laid an infrared-amplified image across her bullet-resistant plastic, so clear that it was close to daylight.

All the press, and most of the military, thought that the Advanced Distributed Aperture System was an idea still in testing. SOAR had seen it, worked on the quiet with Raytheon to take it to the next level, and installed it.

It was frickin’ amazing.

ADAS was to night-vision goggles what NVGs had been to squinting super hard. And because the cameras were mounted outside the helo, there were no blind spots, including straight down. She could see out in every direction as if she were sitting in the sky with nothing around her. She could even see most of the way through the dust of rotor-born brownouts.

A quick blink and she switched her focus to seeing directly through her visor to the world beyond her helmet. Dark night. She blinked again. Everything she needed was projected inside the visor, including the heat signature of the tin roofs.

By 0300 the sun’s heat had dissipated, and the only heat signatures on the roofs now came from the bodies inside. It wasn’t much, but the tin glowed with the slight heat if the space was inhabited. Otherwise they looked solid black.

One of the hottest roofs was close by the compound, the one they’d been told to target. That meant the information was right; a lot of people radiating a lot of body heat under that one particular roof.

As Trisha pulled up to hover in a guard position fifty feet in the air, she could see people running from that building, being herded by a man carrying a rifle. The briefing had warned them there was an embedded friendly doing the inside setup. If there hadn’t been, they’d have had to bring more helos loaded with more Special Operations Forces. But this guy was apparently a one-man rescue machine.

They didn’t reveal any of his details, other than he was absolutely trustworthy and be careful not to kill him. A “high-value asset.” What kind of a crazy i***t, high-value or otherwise, embedded himself in the Somali pirate community? Probably a testosterone-poisoned, adrenaline-junkie jerk with a death wish.

Trisha flew the weaponized attack version of a Little Bird helicopter, so she hovered close but didn’t go to ground. She wasn’t designed for passengers, only a pilot, a copilot, and enough weapons to rip anyone a new hole if they messed with her. The Killer Egg might be small and egg-shaped but it could take down tanks that weighed fifty times more.

Merchant and Mad Max were MH-6Ms, tactical transport versions of the Little Bird. They could get close in and dump off four to six operators. The Little Birds were so small that the SOF guys actually sat three on a side on small, fold-down benches running along the outsides of the helo. They were exposed to the wind, but it was a faster load and unload. They had a rope for fast descent into places that a Little Bird helicopter couldn’t land despite its agility.

They came in quick and low with one Delta Force operator each, who jumped off the benches before the helos touched down. In moments they were shoving rescuees onto the side benches with their backs against the sides of the helicopters and belting them on. As soon as they each had four people on the benches and had slapped helmets onto the hostages’ heads to protect them from the wind, the Little Birds lifted and were instantly headed back toward the beach.

The D-boys rushed the rest of them toward the Vicious, the transport Black Hawk that had grounded nearby. Unable to fit inside the courtyard, it had landed outside the front gate.

“May! Three o’clock.” Wrench, the call sign of Air Mission Commander Stevenson, still sitting back on the ship they had launched from, called down the warning. He had a spy drone circling a thousand feet up and keeping an eye on them. It had taken her forever to break the desire to lean out and see if she could spot the blacked-out eyes in the sky of the high-circling drone. Though the military kept trying to kill off that word, everyone still used it. It was supposed to be UAV, unmanned aerial vehicle. Yeah, right. She managed not to look up for the drone because SOAR had drilled into her head to keep her attention on her own problems.

“I see it!” Trisha called back to Stevenson. She’d been hovering the helo and letting it slowly spin on its axis so that she and Roland, her copilot, swept a complete circle of the area every six seconds. And yet, the AMC spotted the new problem ahead of her. The man was good. She liked that.

With a slight tip of the cyclic, she aligned her weaponry on a doorway where a whole lot of hostiles were pouring out into the compound’s central courtyard.

“Do it!” she called to Roland over the intercom. Roland fired a short burst from the M134 Minigun, a three-second burst that was two hundred rounds. It chewed a line of lead and bright-green phosphor tracers in front of the bad guys. The gun also had a roar like an angry dragon. It was scary as s**t, even when she was the one firing it. On the ground, it heralded imminent death like a hammer blow.

Most of the bad-guys-suddenly-in-over-their-heads backpedaled and slammed against the front wall of the building. Two tumbled back through the door where there was no wall to stop their flailing retreat. A couple guys dropped to the ground, probably shot in the legs by rounds that ricocheted off the hard-packed dirt or kicked-up rocks.

That drew their attention, and their fire, upward. At least they weren’t firing toward the hostage flights anymore.

Trisha rolled left and then pulled hard right, circling around behind the building. Now the front wall blocked the bad guys from a direct line of fire until they moved farther back from the building, which they’d hesitate over. They’d know that would make them more exposed. It also served to keep their backs toward the ongoing rescue operations.

She could hear CW Lola Maloney in the Vengeance handling similar problems further into town with her big DAP Hawk. The Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk was the most powerful and effective heli-aviation gunship platform ever launched. But it weighed close to ten times as much as her bird and moved like it. She’d take the tap dance of the Little Bird over the waltz of the DAP any day.

Trisha slid to a hover behind the building.

That’s when the RPG came at her out of the back window, triggering a painfully loud audible warning system over the headphones embedded in her helmet. Someone had stayed inside, someone smart who had guessed where her first move would be.

Nothing she hated more than a rocket-propelled grenade. She’d been downed in Iraq by one of those while still flying for the Screaming Eagles. It hadn’t been an experience she’d enjoyed much, though she’d managed to autorotate to an okay landing. Truth be told, it had actually scared her right out of the sky until her commander, Lieutenant Beale, had booted her ass back into the air.

She shoved the collective down and drove the bird toward the ground. The RPG shot by with an angry hiss of its rocket motor mere feet over her rotor and a tapering squeal of the audio warning. She leveled May and unleashed a pair of 2.75-inch Hydra 70 rockets into the building. One hit the wall and the other went in through the window before exploding. The tin roof spun up into the air, and the four walls blew outward in a beautiful fireball.

She climbed up through the flames and, through the screening smoke, spotted the collection of baddies in the front yard still looking for a target. About half were down with chunks of wall on them. The other half began pinging lame-ass 5.56 mm rounds off her forward windscreen.

“Take ’em!” she called—and Roland did. A five-second burst from the two Miniguns bolted onto the hardpoints that stuck out either side of her bird, aimed with a jiggle on the cyclic to make a figure-eight pattern concentrating their gunfire. That put the baddies out of action.

The clock said 3:04:03. They’d been in contact for a minute and ten seconds. The hostages should be clear by now.

Once she climbed clear of the smoke and flames, she saw that the transport Black Hawk was indeed lifting and Maloney was riding protection. The other Little Birds were long gone.

Trisha was about to bug out when she saw the lone guy standing where the Black Hawk had just lifted.

At first she thought it might be one of their team, one of the Delta Force boys still on the ground, but he didn’t have the small red shoulder-tabs that would glare in the infrared of her night vision. That would tell her he was a good guy. Nor was he a left-behind hostage, because he had a rifle.