By Break of Day

Chapter 2-1

2

Justin brought the Calamity Jane back to the stern of their ship, the USS Peleliu. The aging Landing Helicopter Assault ship had been taken over from the Marine Corps when they’d tried to retire her.

It was a crazy mash-up of a ship. The Navy’s next-sized class down from the big aircraft carriers, she could carry twenty-five hundred personnel, thirty helos, six Harrier jump jets, and a bellyful of amphibious assault craft and vehicles including trucks and tanks. The latter loaded and unloaded through a rear gate in the stern that opened into a massive well deck awash at sea level and reaching deep inside the ship. She was designed to deliver an entire Marine Expeditionary Unit to the beach, any beach in the world, fast.

SOAR’s 5D had taken her over as a mobile platform to prowl the troubled oceans of the world. Now—including all of the 5D, the fifty US Rangers, a handful of Delta Force operators, and the Navy people to run her—she boasted barely six hundred personnel and six assorted helos. She was at least ten stories from keel to superstructure, so they practically rattled about inside the eight-hundred-foot ship. Her flattop deck stretched over two football fields long and most of one wide.

The air boss signaled Justin to stand off the stern while the other helos came in from tonight’s training exercise.

He and the Jane had only been aboard for a few months, and he’d already flown in numerous live ops in addition to these training exercises. The 5D maintained a blistering op schedule even by the standards of the 10th Mountain Division where he’d been stationed before applying to SOAR. The heavy flight demands were fine with him; he liked the challenges.

But there’d been one mission which he could only infer had actually happened. They’d all gone on leave for one week, one lousy week, and he’d missed something big. That still stuck in his craw. They’d lost the Little Bird helicopter named Maven. And then her pilot and the head Delta Force operator had gone missing for two weeks afterward.

Next thing you knew, a brand-new helicopter had been delivered to take the lost gunship’s place. Then Captain Claudia Jean Casperson and Delta Colonel Michael Gibson were married and back on the ship—serving together no less.

Marriages were another of the things he couldn’t get over about the 5D. Families normally didn’t happen in the same unit of the military. Hell, s*x wasn’t supposed to happen in the military at all—as if that made one lick of sense. Come on, people, corral a clue. Why would a career guy want anything less than a soldier babe?

But the 5D was a horse of a whole different color. Chief Warrant Lola Maloney, pilot of the Vengeance, was married to Tim, who’d recently made the jump from backseater to copilot. Her crew chief Connie was married to Big John who handled the other side gun on the DAP Hawk. Trisha, the Little Bird pilot, and another D-boy…

It was jus’ plain peculiar was all.

Made a man wonder how extreme these folks were that they could get away with such things.

And that thought, and pretty much every other one over the last two months, led him back to Captain Kara Moretti. The gal was hot, no arguing with that. Almost blew his hat off when she’d strolled into the Peleliu briefing room that first time. They had joined the 5D the same day.

But it was way more than that. Carmen, his starboard side-gunner was hot in a San Francisco redhead sort of way. Funny, a great shot, a joy to look at, but that was all. Kara was short, feisty, pain-in-the-ass New York… and his brain switched off and his body switched on every single time she walked by. Or he heard her voice over the radio. Or he thought of her.

The only celebration of their joining the same day had been a massive hostage rescue in the heart of Somalia twenty-four hours later. SOAR was never dull, that was for dang sure.

The landing officer finally called Justin’s helo forward and he settled down onto the stern of the Peleliu.

Thoughts of Kara were so distracting, he practically landed with the rear unloading ramp of his Chinook hanging out over the sea. Man, the Rangers would have loved that. First they get to humiliate the OKK—which the boys had done a damn fine job of—and then their pilot exits them into the night ocean in full gear, probably killing the lot of them in the process.

He shuffled forward to where the landing officer indicated before letting the Jane settle onto the ship. He tried to make it look as if he’d been settling slow, but the LO wasn’t buying that fifty-thousand-pound sashay for a second. Neither was Danny. Justin could feel the eye roll worse than when he was singing.

Once down on the right spot, the first thing he did was pull his helmet and scrub at his hair so that his head could breathe. Second thing he did was reach behind the seat and grab his cowboy hat.

There were so many Yankees and West Coasters in SOAR that a man had to take a stance about something. He only ever wore a white straw Cooper Stetson in the heat, because there was nothing like a classic. In winter he wore a black felt High Point, but there wasn’t a whole lot of winter around the Horn of Africa or in the Mediterranean, so that one had stayed in his cabin so far.

After unloading and cleaning up behind the Rangers, who never left anything quite the way it should be, his crew tackled the postflight lists together. Not his duty, but get it done and get them to their supper had always worked for him. Ma and Pa had always helped clean the stalls, as had every camper at their ranch.

It was close to sunrise. The Peleliu and the 5D worked at night and slept during the day, so suppertime was fast approaching. SOAR’s motto wasn’t Death Waits in the Dark just for the sake of saying it. That’s when they flew and how they lived.

As they worked over the postflight checklists and switched back to live ammunition, the sun gave a warm glow to the Mediterranean horizon. Nothing much to see here—a hundred kilometers offshore left Turkey below the horizon. Cyprus was a smudge to the west and Syria and Lebanon were low hints to the east. Most everything all around was water, empty water.

Unlike the big aircraft carriers, the Peleliu and her helicopter company wandered the seas alone. No destroyers, frigates, oilers, or other craft were about. The Landing Helicopter Assault carrier was always on the move. Since she wasn’t attached to a war, she was ignored by most and well able to defend herself.

It was a matter of thirty minutes to get the Calamity Jane back to shipshape.

Thanking the crew, something he made a point of after every flight, he headed up along the deck as they each dropped down into the bowels of the ship to await mess call.

The Little Birds and DAP Hawks were already serviced and shrouded with nylon covers along the flattop deck of the Peleliu like so many cowpats. Shrouded so that no one would see them clearly by daylight. The grapes—purple-vested fuel handlers—were already pumping Jet A gas into the Calamity Jane. The reds were double-checking the ammunition. Though the SOAR crews hadn’t fired a single live round, they were checked because that was how thorough SOAR was.

As soon as they were done, the deck crews would shroud her, the biggest cowpat of all, at least three times the size of any of the other helos. Though she wasn’t stealth, it made for a consistent presentation to unwelcome surveillance.

The nature of the company’s aircraft was one more weird thing about the 5D. Courtesy of the raid on bin Laden’s compound, Justin had discovered along with the rest of the world that there were stealth helicopters. That most didn’t know they were part of SOAR was exactly the way the Night Stalkers would want it.

And if one crashed in Abbottabad, Pakistan that meant there were at least two on the raid.

And if there were two… He hadn’t expected ever to see one during his career, much less fly with a whole company of them. But here they were, carefully hidden from seeking eyes, their covers softly lit by the oncoming dawn that now was turning the sky gold and knocking the last of the stars out of the heavens. As one of the 5D’s pilots, he was left to wonder what he’d done right with his life to end up here.

His sister, Bessie, had gone Air Force and flew an AC-130 Spooky gunship for them. Dad had done a tour with the Navy on a destroyer. That only left the Army for Justin, because a Roberts didn’t follow in anyone’s footsteps. Regardless if they were kin.

The ranch was his big brother’s job. Rafe had joined their parents in the horse ranching business. A place Justin had thought he’d end up himself, until shortly before the end of his first tour.

He now flew the heavily modified Boeing MH-47G Special Operations version designed for and flown only by SOAR—the Percheron of the heavy-lifters. He truly appreciated the beautiful and noble craft.

During that first tour he’d come to love the simpler CH-47 Chinook that he’d flown for the 10th Mountain Division. She wasn’t just any old helicopter, but rather served as the workhorse of the Army heli-fleet.

Still, he’d thought to do his tour and head home...right until his world had been blown apart, literally.

He did his best to shunt the memories aside, because they sure weren’t good ones. Often they kicked him into a tailspin of epic proportions.

“Hey, Captain Roberts.”

He must be losing his tracking skills to let Kara come up on him without him noticing. “Howdy yourself, Captain Moretti.” He should have expected it. She was always doing that to him, sliding in under his radar even when he was watching out for her.

And this time it was predictable. All the commanders and lead pilots were headed toward the same room for debriefing. The Navy Lieutenant Commander of the Peleliu had established an office in the base of the communications superstructure that towered six stories above the vast deck. Four tiers of flight-ready rooms, command-control spaces, and flight control tower topped by great towers adorned like overladen Christmas trees with antennas, radomes, and other sensing equipment.

“‘Howdy’?” She looked up at him sidelong from most of a foot down—though no man would be fool enough to call her petite, unless he was looking for a black eye.

He could never tell when she was teasing or getting all…New York. Well, he had his pride and responded with a “Yep!”

“Do people actually speak like that where you come from?”

“A’ course! In Amarillo we speak like Americans, not Yankees.”

“Gimme a frickin’ break, Cowboy. If all Americans sounded like you, the rest of the world would need translators so that the translators could understand them.”

He reached for the heavy, soundproof door that led into the communications structure, like Pa had raised him, but she beat him to it as if it was a competition.

The movement placed them so close that his nose was practically buried in the back of her hair. Closest together they’d been in two months aboard.

SOAR’s customers, especially the edgy ones like Delta and SEAL, grew longer hair or beards to blend in with crowds. Only in the 5D did command allow quite so much imitation of their customers. His short hair was the exception to the rule.

And Kara Moretti’s was a downright sin in the other direction. Most of the women let their hair grow down to their shoulders, which was nice to look at. He’d always had a weak spot for longer hair.

But because Kara flew in a box and didn’t have to worry about harness restraints and other hair catchers, she’d let her dark brown hair, with that hint of gold, flow down to the middle of her back in great thick waves. On a military woman it was stunning, evocative, and made him want to dive his hands into it.