Target of Mine

Chapter 2

2

“What the hell did you guys do to my helicopter?” The mechanic was practically screaming. Like he’d never seen a shot-up helo before. It wasn’t as if he was new to the 5E.

Nikita stood off to the side of the hangar next to a long folding table, checking through her gear. It was late afternoon and their four helicopters had just unloaded from the C-5A Galaxy transport. After the long flight home, they’d been reassembled and then hopped to the 5E’s private corner of Mother Rucker. Fort Rucker, Alabama, had gained that name for the brutal standards of the Army flight instructors stationed here and, even though Nikita wasn’t part of the 5E, she’d adopted the name.

“She only has a few holes in her,” Drake Roman protested loudly. “Beatrix done good!”

“Thirty-two,” another mechanic, this one with a clipboard, spoke up. “Thirty-two holes. Who knows how much damage to internal systems we’ll find when we peel off the skins. If it wasn’t a Black Hawk, you’d be dead.”

By Nikita’s estimation, that count was low for a standard mission with the 5E, but mechanics enjoyed whining. Besides, they didn’t count the holes that had been put in Carl.

“Told you she done good,” Drake patted the side of the damaged helicopter.

The helicopter wasn’t the only one who’d done good. Nikita had flown a half dozen missions with the 5E over the last year and they were becoming her favorite assignment. They weren’t designated as a Special Mission Unit, unlike her own DEVGRU SEAL Team 6, but they should be. Most of the time Delta Force and DEVGRU didn’t get anywhere without tapping the Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR.

The Special Operations Aviation Regiment (airborne) delivered her team wherever they needed to go, and always showed up to get them back out no matter what unholy hell was breaking loose. Of them all, the 5E was both the smallest and the most effective. They only had four helicopters: a monstrous twin-rotor Chinook, the lethal DAP Hawk, and a pair of Little Bird attack helos. And they were all stealth rigged—making them some of the rarest helicopters anywhere. In addition, the company had one of the most advanced drones yet produced for their exclusive use.

To her knowledge, the only other company who rated any stealth rotorcraft was the 5th Battalion D Company and the 5D only had two. Which was how the 5E rated their own private corner at Ech Stagefield on Mother Rucker whenever they were home. These assets were best kept hidden.

“What is wrong with those people?” Drake stood directly across the folding tables she’d set up to sort her gear. He stood only a few inches taller than her own five-ten. He was lean, but soldier fit with dark eyes and darker hair. And he was pissed.

“Why do you feel so defensive about your aircraft?” Nikita went back to sorting her ammo to determine how much she needed for restock. For some reason, which her commander Luke Altman wasn’t sharing, he and she had returned with the 5E. Usually they would do what the rest of the SEAL Team had done, just melt away after a mission. Standard protocol was to go back to the DEVGRU base at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia and do a full breakdown of the mission to extract lessons learned. Then start into skills training while waiting for the next call-up.

“Because she did great!” Drake apparently just needed to rant, so she let him. He’d get down to what was actually bothering him eventually. He turned back to glare at the mechanics.

That’s when she recognized the stain pattern on the back of his flightsuit. The outline of the crew chief’s seat back was marked across the fabric—clean where the seat back had been, dark brown where Drake’s arms and shoulders had stuck out beyond the edges of the seat.

Carl’s blood-spray pattern. There’d been a lot of it.

She’d stabilized him with a tourniquet around the stump of his mostly missing arm. And a pressure patch to the mess that was his other shoulder. Glue to close a few more holes. He was still listed as critical at the Antonio Bautista Air Base hospital in the Philippines. The chances of Drake Roman’s fellow crew chief ever leaving there except in a box were slim.

Nikita remembered what Lieutenant Commander Altman had done for her on a similar occasion.

She walked over to the unlocked weapons cabinet where the team had been stashing their mission weapons. She grabbed a pair of MK11 sniper rifles, slipped on suppressors, and selected a couple boxes of ammo.

“Hey, Roman!”

“What?”

When he turned, she threw one of the rifles to him.

He caught it and looked down at it in surprise. “What?”

“You once said that you wish you could shoot like I did.”

“Uh huh.” He’d been her rear guard during a Peruvian mission a few months ago. Six targets, all out past fifteen hundred meters. She’d taken down all six before they figured out what was happening. It was what SEAL snipers were trained for.

“Well, it’s never gonna happen.”

That earned her a perplexed smile. “Great. So what’s with the rifle?”

“I figure that I can’t make you a worse shot than you already are, so anything has to be an improvement.”

He laughed. It was bitter, but it was a laugh. He was one of the top helicopter gunners anywhere. But a Minigun fired from a moving platform like a helicopter wasn’t a sniper weapon—it was a blunderbuss.

“Besides,” she stepped out of the shadows into the sunlight and so-familiar heavy heat of the late Alabama afternoon, “I figure I should get you out of here before the mechanic shoots you, or the other way round.”

“Fine.”

Drake tried to shake off the tightness in his shoulders but wasn’t having much luck with it. They felt as if he was turning into the hunchback of Notre Dame. He had no idea why he was being so twitchy.

Even after a year stationed at Mother Rucker, he wasn’t used to the Alabama heat. He peeled his flightsuit and chucked it over on the laundry pile. The shorts and t-shirt he’d worn underneath weren’t much better. Alabama was a land where sweat didn’t evaporate, it clung.

When Nikita did the same, though, he could feel his mood improving.

She was the first and, as far as he knew, only woman to make DEVGRU through the front door and it showed on her body. She was of a medium build that fit her perfectly. But she wasn’t merely strong, she was carved. Not like a bodybuilder with bulging biceps and six-pack abs. She was carved the way an artist would shape her in cool stone or, better yet, warm wood—not an extra ounce of flesh, but what was there was perfect. Soft, smooth…and tough as hell. Her brunette hair was always pulled back in a painfully tight ponytail that made her look panther sleek. And her light brown eyes were always watching.

He followed her out of the hangar and onto the stagefield. Ech was designed for helicopters only. It had five short runways for practicing mass landings and takeoffs, or emergency procedures. The concrete was rough with a thousand scars from auto-rotation practice and helicopters sliding to a grinding halt on steel skids.

But not a single aircraft had landed here other than the 5E since they took over the field last year. Their four rotorcraft were never left out on the apron. Instead they were immediately rolled out of sight into the field’s lone hangar. The field purposely looked abandoned and unused, weeds growing up through the cracks in the concrete and the surrounding field in need of a good mowing. At the rate it was growing, maybe they should skip mowing and just bale the area as hay.

The only change to Ech Stagefield in the last year was that the hangar was now highly secure and there was a new two-story housing unit big enough for each of the 5E’s fifteen pilots and gunners to have their own tiny apartment in addition to a few guest spaces—those had only ever been used by the SEALs. It included a communal kitchen / dining / briefing room, but most of their meetings were held out at the small cluster of picnic tables between the offices and the hangar.

Ech was surrounded by thick ’Bama forest on all sides: towering longleaf pine and willow oak, hickory and beech, prickly holly and sweet bay. He’d learned the trees when he found out Nikita was from Alabama—not that he’d ever had a chance to show off that bit of knowledge. Even a year here and it still smelled strange, particularly on the quiet evenings when his nose was expecting the Scotch pine, oak, birch, and maple of the New Hampshire hills where his family kept a summer home up on Squam Lake. The only entry to Ech was by air or a narrow dirt road through the forest.

He tromped along behind Nikita as she led him across the tarmac and out into the grassy field.

“Walk softly,” Nikita’s voice was barely louder than the banging in the hangar behind them as the mechanics got to work.

“What does walking have to do with shooting?”

Nikita stopped and he almost ran into her.

“What?”

“Are you here to learn or to whine like a little pissant, Roman?” Soft Southern with a razor-edged tongue.

“To whine like a little pissant!” At least that felt like he was getting something done.

“Okay,” Nikita turned back toward the hangar.

“What? No! Wait.”

She stopped.

He closed his eyes but all he could see was the blood all over the DAP Hawk’s cargo bay. Just wait until the mechanics had to clean that up. Then they’d be sorry. Maybe as sorry as he already was. He’d done what he could, swabbing out the back of the DAP during the long flight home. He’d nearly punched his pilots Rafe and Julian when they offered to help. Carl had been his fellow crew chief, so it had been his job to do and he’d done it alone. Actually, he’d been a rear ramp man on the big twin-rotor Chinook when the 5E formed, but Major Napier liked to cross train his teams by shuffling them around on occasion. Drake had hit the Beatrix Black Hawk three months ago and it had fit him just fine.

He managed a deep breath and opened his eyes. Nikita was still standing there, as impassively as ever—more beautiful than a Grecian statue, waiting for him to choose.

“Okay. If it gets my mind off…” he couldn’t finish the sentence. “I’ll learn anything.”

Nikita nodded and continued to lead him out into the field. “To take your shooting to the next level, you gotta leave emotion behind. Emotion changes heartrate and reaction time. And it breaks concentration. Those are the obvious effects.”

“What are the unobvious?”

“Emotion blurs perception. To shoot at truly long distances, out past a thousand meters or more, your entire being must be perceiving the shot flying true far downrange or you’ll never hit your target.”

“Sounds like mysticism, but put those damn gunrunners back in my sights,”—that’s what they had to have been by the scale of the explosions when the 5E had finally destroyed their boats—“and I’ll show you what I’m perceiving downrange.”

“Look behind us.”

He turned. Through the thick growth of the late-summer-tall grass, he could only see one heavily trampled clear line, his own. Nikita Hayward had hardly left any impression at all.

Walk softly, she’d said.

Drake gazed back at the line of helicopters parked in the hangar beyond.

That’s what the 5E did: their stealth aircraft walked softly and carried a damn big stick.

“Okay. Show me how to do that.”