Target of the Heart

Chapter 1-2

It was pitch dark outside her helicopter when Captain Danielle Delacroix stamped on the left rudder pedal while giving the big Chinook right-directed control on the cyclic. It tipped her most of the way onto her side, but let her continue in a straight line. A Chinook’s rotors were sixty feet across—front to back they overlapped to make the spread a hundred feet long. By cross-controlling her bird to tip it, she managed to execute a straight line between two mock pylons only thirty feet apart. They were made of thin cloth so they wouldn’t down the helo if you sliced one—she was the only trainee to not have cut one yet.

At her current angle of attack, she took up less than a half-rotor of width, just twenty-four feet. That left her nearly three feet to either side, sufficient as she was moving at under a hundred knots.

The training instructor sitting beside her in the copilot’s seat didn’t react as she swooped through the training course at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Only child of a single mother, she was used to providing her own feedback loops, so she didn’t expect anything else. Those who expected outside validation rarely survived the SOAR induction testing, never mind the two years of training that followed.

As a loner kid, Danielle had learned that self-motivated congratulations and fun were much easier to come by than external ones. She’d spent innumerable hours deep in her mind as a pre-teen superheroine. At twenty-nine she was well on her way to becoming a real life one, though Helo-girl had never been a character she’d thought of in her youth.

External validation or not, after two years of training with the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment she was ready for some action. At least she was convinced that she was. But the trainers of Fort Campbell, Kentucky had not signed off on anyone in her trainee class yet. Nor had they given any hint of when they might.

She ducked ten tons of racing Chinook under a bridge and bounced into a near vertical climb to clear the power line on the far side. Like a ride on the toboggan at Terrassee Dufferin during Le Carnaval de Québec, only with five thousand horsepower at her fingertips. Using her Army signing bonus—the first money in her life that was truly hers—to attend Le Carnaval had been her one trip back after her birthplace since her mother took them to America when she was ten.

To even apply to SOAR required five years of prior military rotorcraft experience. She had applied after seven years because of a chance encounter—or rather what she’d thought was a chance encounter at the time.

Captain Justin Roberts had been a top Chinook pilot, the one who had convinced her to switch from her beloved Black Hawk and try out the massive twin-rotor craft. One flight and she’d been a goner, begging her commander until he gave in and let her cross over to the new platform. Justin had made the jump from the 10th Mountain Division to the 160th SOAR not long after that.

Then one night she’d been having pizza in Watertown, New York a couple miles off the 10th’s base at Fort Drum.

“Danielle?” Justin had greeted her with the surprise of finding a good friend in an unexpected place. Danielle had liked Justin—even if he was a too-tall, too-handsome cowboy and completely knew it. But “good friend” was unusual for Danielle, with anyone, and Justin came close.

“Captain Roberts,” as a dry greeting over the top edge of her Suzanne Brockmann novel didn’t faze him in the slightest.

“Mind if I join ya?” A question he then answered for himself by sliding into the opposite seat and taking a slice of her pizza. She been thinking of taking the leftovers back to base, but that was now an idle thought.

“Are you enjoying life in SOAR?” she did her best to appear a normal, social human, a skill she’d learned by rote. Greeting someone you knew after a time apart? Ask a question about them. “They treating you well?”

“Whoo-ee, you have no idea, Danielle,” his voice was smooth as…well, always…so she wouldn’t think about it also sounding like a pickup line. He was beautiful, but didn’t interest her; the outgoing ones never did.

“Tell me.” Men love to talk about themselves, so let them.

And he did. But she’d soon forgotten about her novel, and would have forgotten the pizza if he hadn’t reminded her to eat.

His stories shifted from intriguing to fascinating. There was a world out there that she’d been only peripherally aware of. The Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR weren’t simply better helicopter pilots, they were the most highly-trained and best-equipped ones on the planet. Their missions were pure razor’s edge and black-op dark.

He’d left her with a hundred questions and enough interest to fill out an application to the 160th. Being a decent guy, Justin even paid for the pizza after eating half.

The speed at which she was rushed into testing told her that her meeting with Justin hadn’t been by chance and that she owed him more than half a pizza next time they met. She’d asked after him a couple of times since she’d made it past the qualification exams—and the examiners’ brutal interviews that had left her questioning her sanity, never mind her ability.

“Justin Roberts is presently deployed, ma’am,” was the only response she’d ever gotten.

Now that she was through training—almost, had to be soon, didn’t it?—Danielle realized that was probably less of an evasion and more likely to do with the brutal op tempo the Night Stalkers maintained. The SOAR 1st Battalion had just won the coveted Lt. General Ellis D. Parker awards for Outstanding Combat Aviation Battalion and Aviation Battalion of the Year. They’d been on deployment every single day of the last year, actually of the last decade-plus since 9/11.

The very first Special Forces boots on the ground in Afghanistan were delivered that October by the Night Stalkers and nothing had slacked off since. Justin might be in the 5th battalion D company, but they were just as heavily assigned as the 1st.

Part of their training had included tours in Afghanistan. But unlike their prior deployments, these were brief, intense, and then they’d be back in the States pushing to integrate their new skills.

SOAR needed her training to end and so did she.

Danielle was ready for the job, in her own, inestimable opinion. But she wasn’t going to get there until the trainers signed off that she’d reached fully mission-qualified proficiency.

The Fort Campbell training course was never set up the same from one flight to the next, but it always had a time limit. The time would be short and they didn’t tell you what it was. So she drove the Chinook for all it was worth like Regina Jaquess waterskiing her way to U.S. Ski Team Female Athlete of the Year.

The Night Stalkers were a damned secretive lot, and after two years of training, she understood why. With seven years flying for the 10th, she’d thought she was good.

She’d been repeatedly lauded as one of the top pilots at Fort Drum.

The Night Stalkers had offered an education in what it really meant to fly. In the two years of training, she’d flown more hours than in the seven years prior, despite two deployments to Iraq. And spent more time in the classroom than her life-to-date accumulated flight hours.

But she was ready now. It was très viscérale, right down in her bones she could feel it. The Chinook was as much a part of her nervous system as breathing.

Too bad they didn’t build men they way they built the big Chinooks—especially the MH-47G which were built specifically to SOAR’s requirements. The aircraft were steady, trustworthy, and the most immensely powerful helicopters deployed in the U.S. Army—what more could a girl ask for? But finding a superhero man to go with her superhero helicopter was just a fantasy for a lonely teenage girl.

She dove down into a canyon and slid to a hover mere inches over the reservoir inside the thirty-second window laid out on the flight plan.

Danielle resisted a sigh. She was ready for something to happen and to happen soon.