Colonel Emily Beale, that’s who. Their commander would, of course, have a hidden lesson buried inside the op that would later be revealed as deeply meta-on-meta—obvious in retrospect but that no one except the colonel could have thought up. The woman was seriously deep, which would have brought up any number of jokes by Abby’s cousin, who’d opted to continue in the family’s Maine lobstering tradition. Ocean t’ain’t deep, it only comes up t’ here on the ducks, then he’d hold a hand palm-down at his hip. Ricky loved that one; he wasn’t exactly a deep one himself.
For now, Charlene One—technically Charlie One but neither Abby nor her twelve-ton baby girl were down with that—was the lead bird of the twenty. The Fort Campbell flight controllers had learned that one quickly enough. Mainiacs—as natives of Maine, the nation’s greatest state in the Union—didn’t get angry. They didn’t get even. Instead, they strived to make you look utterly ridiculous for their own amusement. After the third flight controller in a row discovered that his Army boots had been permanently converted into high heels when he wasn’t watching—and been forced to show up to a surprise inspection either wearing those or barefoot—Charlene One’s name and reputation were firmly secured.
Not that she could see a hint of the others on tonight’s flight. She inspected the inside of her visor, flipping quickly through several of the screens using the thumb control on the cyclic between her knees. Nothing. She returned to her primary piloting screen. Ethan would be monitoring systems’ health, threat analysis, and a couple of other displays. As pilot-in-control, her duties were to watch the overlapping images of light-amplified night vision, infrared imaging, and wire frame of the landscape including buildings, power lines, and other known features—and not hit anything.
The Night Stalkers had made most of the innovations for night vision, starting back in the 1980s. She couldn’t imagine those early pioneers who had died while tackling the first-ever Black Routes with nothing more advanced than a high-quality map and balls of steel. Those deaths had driven the early days of simple light amplification to the limits. Now she flew with near-daylight vision and overlaid wire-frame mapping to let her anticipate the terrain well beyond what lay within line of sight. She had no nostalgia for the old days.
For tonight’s op, she and her teammates were given a ceiling of a hundred feet—to the tops of their rotors, which placed the belly of her massive twin-rotor assault bird down at a tree-scraping eighty. Their mission? Hug the terrain in the dark for five solid hours in an NOE—nap-of-Earth flight, the most exhausting other than in a fully engaged battle—and arrive within plus-or-minus thirty seconds of preset times at the three successive destinations, each over four hundred kilometers apart. At each location, they were to land for precisely thirty seconds before racing to the next.
If only it were that simple.
Though never in so large a flight group, it was the type of route she’d flown throughout testing and qualifications. Then Colonel Beale had taken over the regiment, and anything predictable had gone out the window.
This time, their twenty birds were all spaced one minute, five kilometers apart. That meant that if you were outside your time window, you were in the next bird’s slot. Worse, other birds in tonight’s training flight had been blocked from her situational awareness satellite feeds, and they were all too low to be seen on radar. Which was kind of the point. They’d been warned that, if they delayed one another or bunched up, the entire mission would be declared a failure. To avoid any chance of coordination, each bird had been given a separate radio frequency and a slightly different route as well. Only their destinations were in common.
With the cancellation of the rather brilliant Raider and Defiant helicopter designs, the Chinook remained the fastest helo in the fleet, capable of scooting along at three hundred and twenty kmph, nearly two hundred miles an hour. The Osprey and new Valor could go faster, but the ungainly tilt-rotors certainly didn’t fit within the Night Stalkers' need for managing stealth and tight spaces. So, rather than shifting to new cutting-edge brilliance as planned, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—SOAR—would be sticking with their own customizations of the three platforms they’d adopted at their founding forty-four years earlier.
Which was fine with her. They were Night Stalkers; the pilots were what mattered most. Like Cousin Ricky on the lobster boats, she was a legacy in the heavy metal of the Chinooks. Granddad had flown them in Vietnam, Dad in Desert Storm, and she’d survived two tours in Afghanistan before that mess finally shut down.
Canceling the new birds, which their most elite Spec Ops fliers needed, wanted, and had helped design, ranked several steps below incomprehensible. It was as if the top levels of the Department of Defense had shipped their brains to Fiji or?—
“Oh!”
“What?”
“Colonel Emily Beale…” The full name thing was habit forming. It was time Abby declared that it had run its course. “The colonel is up to something.”
“Duh!”
“No, I mean something other, Ethan. Something hidden.” A section of the Cumberland River ran in the right direction, so she dropped down to ten meters from belly to water, now watching out for bridges she’d have to pop over rather than power lines to duck under.
“Such as?”
“They took away Raider and Defiant.” And she left it there to see if he reached the same conclusion.
It didn’t take him long. “They wouldn’t!”
“They might.”
“Come on, the DoD ain’t that stupid.”
Abby wished. In her experience, the Dummies of Defense—as the Department of Defense command in the Pentagon were often called—were absolutely that stupid. “Colonel Beale isn’t breaking the training regimens for the fun of it…”
Ethan sighed. “She’s trying to find a way to keep the Night Stalkers relevant.”
Because the DoD was maneuvering, with their typical complete lack of foresight, to make them irrelevant. “Sure, let’s cut the budget by axing the one regiment that Spec Ops depends on for transport into and back out of The Ugly. Why? ‘Because we’re idiots and it saves us money even as it guts a key element of the nation’s security.’” She did the last in a fake hick accent that totally stereotyped about a third of the country.
Ethan merely groaned.
But if the colonel was fighting back, it meant tonight’s mission was only the beginning.
At the Tennessee-Alabama border, Charlene’s threat sensors picked up a pair of incoming MH-6M Little Bird helicopters.
“Shit! We aren’t equipped to fend off those!” Chinooks boasted four whole guns. They could do immediate-area ground defense, but up against missile-equipped birds? Two steerable M134 Miniguns and a pair of lousy little M240D medium machine guns, all facing to the sides, weren’t going to cut it. They usually flew with their own attack Little Birds and Black Hawks to protect them when the airspace turned nasty.
She checked the rapidly resolving image as they approached close enough to reveal details. They weren’t MH-6 transports with a bench seat on either side for delivering Delta Force or Rangers into battle. These had a stubby wing on either side from which missiles and Miniguns could be mounted. These were AH-6—as in attack-helicopter—Killer Egg Little Birds. The things were lethal out to five kilometers; her Miniguns were effective to only one.
“Encrypted text message,” Ethan reported. Rather than a traceable transmission on the encrypted radio, someone had sent a short blast up to the satellite, which came back to them in an untraceable signal, which was then decrypted.
