Wait Until Dark

Chapter 5

5

They made it with twenty-eight minutes to spare.

John flexed his hand again, wincing at the pull across his barked knuckles and the long scrape that ran from wrist to elbow.

Twenty-eight minutes. Enough for a shower and a shave. Time to stuff his gear in his duffel and grab something better than the energy bar he’d stuffed down midday. He strolled toward the helo in the evening light with his kit on his back, a stack of salami sandwiches in his hand, and a cold Coke in one of his thigh pockets.

Beale and Clay had pitched in where they could, but for the most part an officer’s usefulness on a repair was measured by their increasing distance from the job. Front-seaters knew how to fly but were trouble beyond that. Major Beale had West Pointed in, never working as a back-ender other than in training.

Every now and then a noncom made the jump to front seat like Clay, but no chief in his right mind would ever let them touch anything mission-critical again. Sure they thought they still knew, but they were wrong. Without constant study, no mere officer could keep up with all of the technology required to keep a Black Hawk humming.

Even if Clay Anderson had stayed qualified, a DAP Hawk was a whole different bird beyond that. Newbies thought the mods designed by SOAR couldn’t be that drastic. But the Direct Action Penetrators were custom-built for SOAR and SOAR alone. Built from the ground up on a Black Hawk frame, but that and their name was about all that remained in common with the most manufactured helicopter on the planet. There were whole layers of gear and electronics that no other helicopter had ever carried.

John stood now at the entrance to the hangar and admired their handiwork as he bit off another chunk of his first sandwich.

Fewer than twenty DAPs were spread across five battalions, among the rarest and definitely the most lethal weapons ever launched into the night sky. Also one of the most complex. Seventeen separate software systems, eight in the weapon systems alone, networked across four different media. And that was only if you didn’t count the beamed-in ground reference, the satellite imaging systems, or the new drone feeds they’d recently installed.

The major had made sure they were towed into the one Rubb shelter at the base. Covered in desert camo, the towering temporary hangar kept out most of the sand and all of the sun, making the desert midday heat merely intolerable rather than potentially lethal. The hangar also offered a ceiling-mounted crane that had been essential to the repairs.

John patted the side of his bird. She’d done good getting them home, and it still pained him that they’d been unable to complete the cosmetic repairs along with the critical ones.

The Hawk squatted, looking lethal sitting still. In the air his baby looked downright terrifying. The squat and wide profile of the main fuselage was augmented by the weapons pylons reaching outward to either side from the midsection’s roof. Two mounting hard points on each pylon, they presently held a nineteen-round rocket pod, a 30 mm Vulcan cannon good for punching fist-sized holes in anything less armored than a main battle tank, and two four-racks of tank-killing Hellfire missiles, in case they happened to run across one that wanted permanent erasure.

And she was good to go. Still needed calibration and testing, of course, but all of the working pieces were back where they belonged and operational.

No matter how Connie dug under his skin, he had to admit he couldn’t have pulled it off with a lesser mechanic. Crazy Tim, who’d chipped in from time to time, couldn’t come close. John felt bad for thinking the thought. He and Tim had flown together since Basic. A decade in the air, mostly in the same bird. He knew Tim was a rock-solid gunner in any situation and a better-than-average mechanic. But Sergeant Davis operated on a whole different level.

Each tool he’d needed, Connie had slapped into his hand as he reached for it. When she was deeply involved in rebuilding the flare launch system, the right part for the threat sensor waited where he could reach it when he needed it most.

Where he’d have applied brute strength, she applied leverage, though she wasn’t shy about asking for his help when his power was needed. Not that she spoke more than ten words in as many hours they’d sweated over the job. She would simply preset, align, and then assume his strength would be applied at the required moment. She made it easy.

And those fine hands of hers. At first they pissed him off as they reached into places where he’d have had to pull panels and equipment to gain access. He didn’t appreciate them until he’d grunted down the FLIR camera head. Not only the forward-looking infrared radar had been blown to smithereens, but most of the network bus behind it. In a dance of those fine fingers, she’d repaired in an hour what would have taken him six.

The rotor had been the worst. They’d finally dismounted the whole thing and laid it out on a couple of tables hijacked from the chow tent. Standing on either side, they’d torn it down to the bearings and put her back together again.

All in silence. They both knew what to do. Four hours to tear down and paste the rotor head back together—less than half the time projected in any manual. Two hours faster than his and Tim’s best. She was incredible.

He’d tried filling the silence with questions, but never elicited more than a single-word answer.

Her homes had been a list of military bases.

Her training had been her father and a list of jobs starting with Sikorsky, the Black Hawk’s manufacturer, and moving through several of the primary electronics vendors before the Army.

Her family… Before Connie joined the Army, Connie’s family…

That one bothered him the most. Those questions had been answered with silence.

Connie took a sandwich from Big John’s open hand. He didn’t startle the way he normally did around her.

She hadn’t had time to grab any food or a shower. Halfway through packing her gear she remembered something she’d seen. Not directly, but from the corner of her eye. It hadn’t taken her long to place the image, and it sent her scrambling back to the helo, her kit bag banging against her back.

She’d uncovered the port-side turbine engine and there it was. As neatly snipped as if done with the finest shears, a quarter-inch of pressure-feedback-loop fuel line simply wasn’t there. No bend or flex to draw attention to the damage.

By the angle, a round must have passed within inches of her face during the firefight. She’d never heard the one that came the closest to getting her. Instead, it had come in the gunner’s windows, missed her and the Minigun, and punched through the cabin roof, drilling the neat 7.62 mm hole her mind had noticed, though she hadn’t. It had continued upward with enough energy to remove that tiny section of the main fuel system.

They’d been running on the auxiliary feed, part of a standard back-and-forth use of systems to make sure everything kept working. Last night no one had noticed, but tonight they would have the moment they tried to lift off, running again on the primary fuel system. They’d be facing an engine fire in the first few minutes of flight.

She bit into the sandwich, heavy on the tomatoes and mustard. Exactly the way she would have made it for herself.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” John’s voice was a low rumble. They headed to the helo together, moving with that same harmony they’d been working in for the last thirteen hours. She’d never met a man so easy to be with since her father. Was it disloyal to think that John was perhaps easier than that?