She authorized the connection, but read-only. No data would travel back to the US Air Farce Circus’s man, whether or not he was a clown. And she slotted it as an isolated view on its own screen, not the full-display request.
The new option popped up on her menu: CCA. She selected it with the thumb controller.
Night Stalkers trained hard to absorb and process huge amounts of visual and auditory data rapidly. When threat sensors lit up over navigational views requiring targeting and firing solutions, only to be interrupted by damage reports, a girl had to stay on top of it all.
The CCA selection gave her a flash of nausea. The unexpected shift as her viewpoint jerked a hundred meters to starboard and thirty meters up. As if someone had tried to yank the rug of the landscape out from beneath her feet and only succeeded in shifting it. Now it was her own bird showing up to port and below, from the CCA’s view. Even as she watched, it picked up flights climbing out of Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Each shifted from yellow, when spotted, to green as it tagged the aircraft with its flight number. Green must be known aircraft. Not the way her Army-built helo’s display reported, but she got the idea fast enough.
Which all meant she wasn’t doing her job as a copilot. She flipped back to the tactical screens for her own bird, pausing to check the aircraft’s health status. All nominal.
“What the hell game are we playing?”
Derek laughed. “When you find out, be sure to tell me.”
“Maybe yes. Maybe no.” There sure wasn’t anyone she could ask. She was the lead bird on this twenty-long daisy chain flight of Chinooks. Except it didn’t mean anything as they weren’t connected. So, she was the lead on a flight of one Chinook, one Little Bird that she trusted after its amazing flight during the earlier face-off with the Black Hawk, and a CCA she wouldn’t be trusting this side of the North Maine Woods. “Guess we’re just waitin’ a bit on that overwatch bird to tell us what’s going on,” she nodded upward.
“It had better be soon,” Ethan spoke up. “Our assigned time at Fort Bragg is in four minutes.”
Crap! Abby checked the route map and the timing. During her inattention, Ethan had kept them within their assigned plus-or-minus thirty-second window—barely. His sole job during NOE ops was to fly; her job included everything else. Hard against thirty seconds over their time meant zero leeway for surprises as she’d used at Fort Rucker. They’d get thirty seconds on the ground and then have to scoot—ready or not. “Try nudging up three knots.”
Ethan did. But the Little Bird, up at its limits, began falling behind.
“Ease back.” It was up to her to handle threats and navigation. “My bad.”
“We got this,” Ethan floated up to clear a set of power lines. The CCA was above the power lines already; the Little Bird slid under and then dodged through the trees on the far side. Ethan eased back down before twisting sideways around a barn. Most of the Black Route avoided towns and homes, but in a few places there simply wasn’t a choice.
“Two minutes.” Abby announced to the crew chiefs. “Sam, we don’t know what’s coming or going, so I want the ramp on the ground within one second of our wheels.”
“Roger that.”
“You sticking or going, Derek?”
“My guess?—”
Overwatch cut him off. “Emergency re-route to 35.131 by -79.06. Half squad. Debus.”
Abby punched the new latitude and longitude into the NavComp as Overwatch read them out. Debus meant a hot insertion—rapid deployment. But it was only going to be half their load, which meant they had to stay on the ground while the remaining load was shifted and re-chained to the deck.
“Huh,” was all Derek said before Abby heard the click of him dropping off the intercom. A half turn of her head showed that the jump seat behind her had been folded away and no one blocked her view of the packed cargo bay. She missed having him there. Who knew when she’d see him again. The Spec Ops world was small, but not that small. With the approximately three hundred Delta Force operators and the Night Stalkers’ two hundred aircraft, their meeting again soon didn’t seem likely.
Facing her readouts once more, she saw something good had come of the change. “Those coordinates are fifty-four seconds closer than Pope Airfield on the other side of the base. So, we’ll be early instead of late.”
“Good-some news.”
Ethan earned her laugh. She waited a beat for Derek to inject a comment, but he wasn’t there.
6
Derek didn’t like dividing the team. Especially sending half of them into an unknown situation of a hot LZ. Even a simulated hot landing zone had to be approached with serious caution. He also didn’t like that someone up there was messing with them.
And not just Colonel Beale. She might be a legend, but she didn’t command the kind of power that could launch half of Delta Force from Bragg to Rucker on a C-5 Galaxy super transporter, merely so that they could be dragged back by helo. Although he’d only met her twice, Beale struck him as a woman well able to get her way.
And what the hell was that Air Force drone jet doing here? After its first flight, there should be another year of flight testing and refinement before an overtly stupid AI was flying lethal hardware on a training mission.
Don’t think, boy. This the Army is. Just do.
Yes sir, Drill Sergeant Yoda, sir!
As the helo slammed to a halt, he had someone stationed at every chain. From a dead stop, the bird settled a foot…and touched down. Damn, but these pilots were good. At his signal, they dumped the chains on all four tires of both vehicles. He saluted his number two as they accelerated backward off the ramp. The forward non-exiting DAGOR backed as if their bumpers had been stuck together until it reached the middle of the cargo bay and slammed on its brakes.
