By Break of Day

Chapter 1-2

“God, spare us.” Danny Corvo spoke up from the left-hand copilot seat. From there he was Justin’s second set of eyes and the master of the helo’s general health and well-being.

“Oh, give me a home,” Carmen cut in from her position at the starboard gun close behind Justin’s seat.

Carmen Parker was hot s**t with an M134 Minigun that could unload three thousand rounds-a-minute of hell on anyone who messed with her. She was also king, er, queen of the bird—the absolute last word on maintenance and loading.

“Where the Chinook helos roam.” Talbot George was always off-key at the side gun behind Danny’s copilot position, but he sang with heart, though with a distinctly British accent.

“And the flights are at night every day,” the three of them sang together in splendidly awful harmony.

Danny groaned as if in the throes of death-by-torture agony.

As usual, Raymond Hines kept his own counsel at the rear ramp gunner’s post. The Chinook was the size of a school bus inside. Tonight, in the cargo area between the cockpit and Ray’s rear post, thirty US Rangers and their three ATVs were counting on SOAR to sling them into position. On the outside, the Jane was half again as wide due to the long auxiliary fuel tanks hung low along the fuselage. They gave her a massive operational range, completely aside from the refueling probe that Justin could extend beyond the edge of the rotors for a midair tank up if needed.

The big rotors fore and aft let her lift her own weight in cargo; especially in high-hot conditions the Chinook out-performed most everything around.

By the third chorus their harmonies were better, so Justin hit the transmit switch for the last of it. It got the answering transmission he was hoping for.

“Justin, honey?”

“Here for you, sweetheart.” Kara Moretti slayed him. From the first briefing where she’d moseyed in all dark and Italian and perfect, his head had been turned hard enough that he kept checking his neck for whiplash. Then when she opened her mouth and poured out thick Brooklyn… Two months later and he still didn’t know what to do with that, not a bit of it. It was all… wrong, yet so right. Her voice should be sweet bella signora, like the one he’d spent a week with while stationed at Camp Darby outside of Pisa on the Italian coast a couple years back.

Instead Kara was—

“You do that to me again and you’re gonna be singing soprano the rest of your life. We clear, Cowboy?”

—a hundred percent, New York. “Y’all wouldn’t do that to me now, would ya?” He laid it on thick.

“Castrate the bull calf? In a heartbeat. And I ain’t your sweetheart.”

“I’ll hold heem down whilst you be trimmin’ ’em,” Lola Maloney called in from the DAP Hawk—her New Orleans old crone accent painfully authentic.

He was about to say something about how it made the meat taste more luscious and tender—which was why they castrated most bull calves—but he couldn’t figure out how to phrase it without it sounding crude and perhaps tempting her to start looking for neutering shears, when Trisha cut in.

“Roger that! We’ll pin him, you chop and cauterize. Use an especially hot iron.”

Claudia Jean Gibson at the controls of the Maven II didn’t speak much, but he could feel her out there agreeing with them.

Justin winced in imagined pain, as he was sure every man on the comm circuit did. He figured maybe it would be better if he kept his mouth shut. Once the women of the 5D got on a roll, wasn’t no man on God’s green earth who was safe.

At a dozen kilometers to target, the whole flight of five helos dropped from ten meters above the ground to three. No time to sing now.

The overlap imaging inside his helmet took serious concentration when flying true nap-of-the-earth. The NOE software suite fed him programmed satellite terrain models that let him see the big stuff up ahead. Live infrared from the nose camera told him when he was about to eat a tree or the side of a house. And Kara’s feed from the Gray Eagle provided the tactical landscape to overlay on the other two. All of it projected on the inside of his helmet’s visor along with key engine and flight indicators—most of which he left up to Danny to manage as copilot.

They were doing what no other helicopter pilots anywhere could. Two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour and no higher off the dirt than a horse. They hugged mountainsides and deep valley bottoms like they were birds of prey on the hunt.

He loved slinging his helo over the low terrain. Now they were getting down to it.

Kara was briefly mesmerized by watching the helos fly across her display. The 5D pilots were the best, and everyone knew that, but, damn, they were fun to watch. She could pick out each pilot simply by how they flew across the terrain.

Trisha was the slick knife, straight slices from Point A to Point Z, skipping the twenty-four places in between as if they didn’t exist. Claudia so smooth that she blended into the landscape, and Lola Maloney practically bebopped ten tons of gun platform across the sky. Dennis flew his Merchant of Death as aggressively as Trisha.

And then there was the cowboy.

In his massive Chinook, he should have lumbered; instead he soared. He SOARed. Hyuk! Hyuk! She could practically hear Justin and that deep laugh of his—the man was absolutely convinced he was the funniest thing around.

He flew as if he were settled back in his saddle loping over the prairie, not dodging through the rough and arid wasteland of central Turkey. That’s assuming he was a real cowboy and not limited to the hat and the drawl. Probably tried line dancing once at a Cincinnati cowboy bar and bought a hat in the gift shop.

Tago flashed the close-up tactical feed showing the Turkish OKK’s positions onto Kara’s side screen. She forced her attention away from watching the perfect harmony of Justin’s lope over the wilderness.

The OKK still squatted right where they’d been all along, hunkered down in a valley like sitting ducks. She’d thought they were better than that.

They were better than that! They were…

Right where they knew they’d be seen! The SOAR flight was sixty seconds out.

Come on, girl. Think! Think! It’s gotta be a trap.

Assume that it was. Then what did that tell her? It was…

Like the time the i***t boys had clambered out onto the roof of Keating Hall and decided to flour-bomb random college girls as they trooped up the front steps. But they’d made a crucial tactical error. For their initial target, they’d bombed the female cadre of the Fordham University Army ROTC program—Cadet Captain Kara Moretti in the lead.

The flour bombers had left two boys at ground level to engage and flag likely targets, slowing them down. The initial rooftop attack had worked all too well, leaving Kara and her cadre enveloped in a cloud of hot-pink-stained flour and raucous laughter. But not for long.

Kara had signaled Cadet Master Sergeant Merry to deal with the two lookouts on the ground. When it was Sergeant Merry, one girl versus two civilian boys was plenty.

Kara had led the rest of her team straight into the hall at a fast trot, leaving a long line of hot-pink dust up the marble stairways. Three hand signals and they’d split up and cut off all angles of escape. Ten minutes later, her entire cadre had headed for the showers, smiling.

The disorganized attackers were left dangling upside down—wearing secure impromptu harnesses fabricated from handy fire hoses—off the edge of the roof four stories in the air.

They’d been rescued soon enough, though it had been hours before they’d thought to track down their two spotters on the ground. Those two were eventually unearthed in the bushes outside Keating Hall trussed with their own shoelaces and gagged with each other’s dirty underwear. Kara had always liked the way Cadet Master Sergeant Merry thought things through.

That’s what the group of OKK clustered in the Turkish valley was doing; they were the distraction. Slowing SOAR down and drawing their focus. They needed to be spanked, but the real threat would be ranged and ready somewhere nearby. The question was: How close?

Forty-five seconds out.

Once she thought it through, it was obvious.

“Little Birds, split and circle the hills.” She rattled off helicopter names and target coordinates. “They have shooters placed high at these locations. Land on their heads.”

“Vengeance,” she called to Lola’s gunship. “Climb to three thousand feet. Your primary targets will be…” She listed off more coordinates. “Make some noise and light once you’re up there.” It was against the unspoken rules to ask a stealth helicopter to make noise, but Lola didn’t argue.

Chief Warrant 4 Lola Maloney might have the most seniority and skill—experience counted more than rank here, another thing to appreciate about the Night Stalkers. But during an operation the Air Mission Commander called the shots.

Kara could get into this AMC role. She spoke, and the tactical map reflecting the team’s actions shifted and morphed into seriously bad news for the OKK.

Not that she was power-trippin’ or any such thing. But she could see it, like one big gestalt, right where the Turkish Special Forces had to have parked their butts if they were good without being truly great like the US Special Ops Forces.

Key hideout positions would be tromped by the Little Birds coming up over the backs of ridges.

The DAP Hawk, well able to defend itself, would perch high to attract attention and draw simulated fire.

Now for the hammer blow.

“Texas,” she called to Justin. “Come in fast and low. Fast-rope six Rangers down on top of the small hillock at the southwest corner to draw their attention.” She circled the target hill on her screen so that it would transmit to the tactical display shining on the inside of his helmet’s visor.

“Then fly and land here.” She drew a line that circled behind a low ridge—cutting an arc around the OKK team sitting as bait—where she’d found him a small dip in the landscape that would provide cover while unloading the rest of the Rangers.

The OKK would be trying to follow his circling, which would draw the ground troops’ attention away from the first Ranger team, who could then start taking potshots at the bad guys’ backs to distract them from the main force.

“Let the rest of your Rangers loose here. Then climb to a thousand feet directly below the DAP Hawk to offer your gunners prime shooting.”

Nobody responded.

They didn’t need to. This was SOAR. All of those logistics in what could and could not be reliably assumed had been answered during the two years of training in the 160th. And that was after having a minimum of five years flight experience elsewhere in the armed forces.

She’d thought herself a real hotshot pilot of her RPA, until the first day of SOAR training. It had been a humbling moment. She’d kicked ass ever since to make sure it didn’t happened again. The SOAR instructors were good at their job; in addition they were Night Stalker pilots themselves and knew s**t that she’d never dreamed of back in the 27th Special Operations Wing.

Tonight, the SOAR fliers simply reacted to her commands. Once in the inner ring of the engagement, they only used radios for emergency communications like this last-moment change. Otherwise the Night Stalkers flew missions in absolute silence. Though she’d have to find a way to curb Mr. Texas during transit times. She’d ignore the fact that his song had made her laugh so hard that Tago had offered to thump her back.