Night Stalkers: By Break Of Day Part 8

Justin tuned them out and let himself watch Kara fly as the two of them continued to banter.

All of the flying he'd watched her do prior to this had been very standard, high-alt.i.tude, grid-pattern or circling pa.s.ses.

But now she was in it. Her tiny craft was hugging streambeds, flying so low it had to hop up to clear a barrier guardrail along a road she crossed.

She ducked under a power line hanging so low that even a Little Bird wouldn't try it, and she did it all clean.

"What else have you flown, Kara?" Justin cut off Wilson in mid-whine. Wilson looked thankful for the reprieve, but that hadn't been Justin's intent.

"Gray Eagle, Predator, ScanEagle. Flew Global Hawk a couple times. Why?"

"Well, sweetheart." He couldn't believe that had slipped out, but forged ahead before it would sound in any way unnatural. "You fly like a helo pilot."

"I do?" She was surprised, but didn't bobble the flight for even a split second. Good thing considering that her present flight elevation was a bare wingspan above the rough terrain.

"Like a cross between Trisha and..." He couldn't quit identify it.

"You," Michael said quietly.

Justin glanced over, but the Colonel appeared to be serious. He turned back to watch Kara's maneuvers, and there was little he could have done himself to improve them. The attacks were more aggressive, but the flight was so smooth that they almost didn't show.

"I watch you fly a lot when we're on a mission." Her voice was soft.

Which was almost daily with the 5D.

"You're really amazing to watch fly, Cowboy."

"Aw shucks, lady. Now my head no longer fits in my hat."

Kara went silent and concentrated as she closed in on the base.

Justin could feel the other two guys looking at him strangely, but he didn't turn to see. He was too busy watching poetry in motion as the ScanEagle honed in on its target.

Kara ran down the final wadi that twisted and turned its way toward the perimeter wall that encircled the base.

She tried not to think about what Justin had said. She could feel him flying with her, even though he sat in an observer chair. Could feel the way they would have flowed down the narrow canyon if he were the one in control and she were the one watching. It was as if they flew it together and that- The ScanEagle broke into the clear.

The perimeter wasn't just a fence, but rather a towering wall topped with razor wire and cleared of even the occasional dead shrub for ten meters either side. With the Israelis' hard-learned but absolute paranoia, the entire perimeter probably had motion detectors inside the walls and land mines outside. Of course, since Israel hadn't signed the Ottawa Convention of 1997 banning the use of the evil little devices, any more than the U.S. had, why the h.e.l.l not.

She wished that the ScanEagle could release one of its tiny kin like a Wasp or other micro aerial vehicle, but they didn't have that capability yet. She'd have to take the ScanEagle over the razor wire.

Kara set up to fly a circuit around the base while remaining a hundred meters outside the perimeter fence, but would bet on having no luck on any frequency. It simply wasn't going to be that easy.

The last three nights had embedded the air base in her mind's eye, no need to look at the maps. Two long runways and a taxiway cut roughly east-west across the desert. To the south huddled a small community of the forsaken Israeli soldiers.

Fortified aircraft hangars, hardened against aerial attack with protective layers of dirt and rock, lined the twisting taxiways close by the airfield. Midfield boasted the largest building of the entire complex. Either side of it was framed by lines of Apache helicopters, fast and lethal craft sold to the Israeli Defense Force by the U.S. If they ever wanted to invade the Sinai again, or rebuff the Egyptians if they were crazy enough to brave the Negev, Ramon Airbase had plenty of firepower on hand.

To the northeast were two cl.u.s.ters of buildings unconnected by taxiways. Farther out, close against the perimeter fence, was the American Camp, mostly trainers and aircraft mechanics. Their fences were even higher than the perimeter fence, even against the Israelis. They had an Olympic swimming pool, bigger than the one for the much more numerous Israeli community. The American Camp was connected to a long and highly defensible perimeter road. The IDF weren't the only paranoid ones out here in the desert.

It had taken Kara some time to get over the inherent disorientation of her job. She was sitting in the GCS coffin, Tago at her side and Justin close behind her at the secondary sensor control panel. He had rapidly proven that he was a fair hand at making sure she saw critical data.

She had reserved a screen for him. He kept it populated with whatever he felt was most critical and correctly chose what she needed almost as often as Tago. She'd be watching infrared, and he'd slip in a visible-light view that showed the nighttime streetlights of an upcoming town to avoid. Or a tactical display showing a pair of F-16s doing a lazy patrol along the Egyptian border.

w.i.l.l.y hovered and Michael watched so silently he might as well not be there.

But Kara was mostly aboard her little UAV, flexing her wings to skim close along the side of a towering mesa or sliding into a winding wadi to catch an updraft and soar upward with no need for additional pilot control, the world's winds supporting her flight.

She often felt she was looking down from on high, not watching screens in a steel box. The disconnect was a deeply evocative experience that was better than s.e.x with, well, most men. Given a choice, she knew which she'd rather be doing. This.

But instead of slipping comfortably along the perimeter fence, she was riding on the swell of heat that had accompanied Justin's kiss- Dammit! That man! He was definitely causing her problems.

Focus back on the view!

There was one more cl.u.s.ter of buildings at the air base. It was to the northeast, close beside the runway and well separated from the American Camp. Two slender access roads of gravel were all that connected it to the rest of the complex.

If there was something nasty going on, she'd wager it was there. Even one of the hardened hangars wouldn't be as good a bet; too many curious personnel in the surrounding plane bays.

She checked the clock.

One minute to midnight. The Activity team should be trying on the hour-the witching hour.

Well, my little ScanEagle broomstick, let's take a flight.

It didn't sound as if Kara had meant to say that aloud. Justin liked hearing the little mutterings to herself that she made as she flew.

If Tago heard them, he gave no sign. He looked so totally absorbed in flying the Gray Eagle as a high communications platform that the outside world didn't intrude.

That man!

Focus back on the view!

ScanEagle broomstick...

She offered intriguing glimpses into her thought process. It was also rather cute because she appeared to be wholly unaware of it.

Then, without warning, she turned a sharp ninety degrees to her previous course, slipped upward on the wind, and crossed the perimeter fence.

Wilson cursed in surprise.

Justin made sure that the Electronic Intelligence package was displayed on her auxiliary screen as well as sending audio to the speakers. But if there was any alert from the tower or security, the ELINT didn't pick it up.

"What the h.e.l.l, Moretti? That's not the plan we-"

Before Justin could think, he was out of his chair and had Wilson up on his toes. He did it by pinching with his thumb and forefinger on either side of Wilson's throat. He moved in until they were nose to nose despite Justin's greater height. He kept his voice low and even, the way Dad always had right before he tanned your behind.

"Y'all asked the lady to do a job. Now, I would like to suggest that you keep your trap shut and not disturb her concentration. Are you trying to make this mission fail by interrupting the pilot's concentration?" He resisted the urge to pinch harder and leave bruises. Instead, he pushed away and the man stumbled backward, landing hard into the steel wall.

Wilson prepared to surge off the wall, and Justin braced himself so that he couldn't be knocked back into Kara at this crucial moment.

Michael reached out and placed his hand on Wilson's chest. It didn't look as if he really did anything, but Wilson flinched back and hunched as if attempting to escape a sudden great pain.

"I understand you are concerned about your men." Michael's voice was as calm as could be. "These people are the very best at what they do. I'd recommend that you consider that." Then he removed his hand.

Justin could see now that Michael had grabbed a fold of pectoral muscle in an odd hold that Justin didn't recognize.

Wilson sagged when Michael released him.

Michael nodded for Justin to return to his duties.

Justin settled into his chair and checked Tago and Kara. Neither appeared to have noticed anything occurring in the coffin, and he could see why.

The ScanEagle-despite a ten-foot wingspan-was slaloming between trucks, slewing around a pair of garbage Dumpsters, and actually slipped beneath a building's awning as Kara wound her way through the compound.

It was a crazy ride. He felt dizzy as his MH-47 Chinook-trained reflexes kept searching for some control to jerk the craft aloft and out of such tight quarters. He'd seen Little Birds fly under phone lines and Black Hawks fly under big power lines, but a Chinook wanted some s.p.a.ce around her and all of his instincts had been trained to maintain that.

Kara's world was another matter entirely. It was a world of mailboxes and fence posts. But she made it look so smooth.

She wove in and out of alleys and pa.s.sages throughout a small group of buildings isolated from the rest of the base.

A glance at the Gray Eagle's feed showed no infrared images of guards wandering through the area, but it was still a huge risk. The ScanEagle was radar resistant and quieter than a standard RPA, but it still had a gas engine and a propeller-it was far from silent or invisible.

And then she circled again, and the ELINT screen s.h.i.+mmered with an incoming signal.

"Yankee Four," crackled over the speakers inside the coffin, barely powerful enough for Kara to pick out of the noise threshold of static.

Yankee Four? Wilson had said the team and the mission were named "Ya'akov Blue"-Jacob Blue.

Oh. Four Americans. Exactly the number there were supposed to be, and elegantly communicated. They wouldn't know that the rescue pilot would know their code name.

Kara narrowed the frequency and almost ate a lawn chair at sixty knots during her moment of inattention.

"Roger, Ya'akov Blue." Two could play that game. "Is extract required?"

There was no response.

Tago flashed up a Gray Eagle track of her own ScanEagle flight. He dropped a circle on where she'd received the transmission. She did a loop-the-loop right over the top of the three-story building that she'd been circling and plummeted back toward where she'd picked up the signal the first time.

"Roger, Ya'akov Blue. Is extract required?"

"Immediate!" snapped right back.

Kara stared at the screen, almost too long, only managing to twist the tiny RPA out of the way of a small shack by inches. If the structure had a chimney or antenna, she'd have tangled her bird in it and gone down.

"Roger," she told them and scooted back toward the perimeter fence-and the anonymity of the desert.

"Extract," she called out to the others in the coffin. "I need a solution. Now."

"Circle back. Tell them to listen at 0200," Justin replied. "And they need to be ready to move very fast."

She did as he told her, and then scooted once more for the fence after receiving back a microphone key click in acknowledgment.

Not until she was five kilometers outside the perimeter fence and Tago had reported no activity on base did she set the ScanEagle to do an auto-circle around a barren chunk of desert sky.

She turned her chair, ignoring Wilson.

Justin sat close behind her; with them both turned, they were nearly knee to knee. She wished she could have turned away from the screen for a sec to see what he'd done to Major Wilson to silence him. She'd wager it was good. Justin had big, strong hands, the kind that you'd expect on six-foot-two of cowboy-exactly the sort a girl always hoped for but never actually happened in real life.

Had it really been just three days since she was certain she'd never have anything to do with him? Time flies when you're having fun.

"Okay, whatta you got for me, Justin?"

His sky-deep blue eyes made a few suggestions that were exactly what her body had in mind, if not her schedule.

"I can be there in two hours-half an hour prep, ninety-minute flight. The Calamity Jane moves over twice the speed of your ScanEagle. She may not be stealth, but she's got all of the quieting technology they could bolt onto her including a radar suppressant skin. Let me go fetch them."

"You want to land one of the largest helicopters in the U.S. inventory in the middle of an IDF base?"

Justin just grinned at her. "Land? Nope, not for a single darned second."

Kara had sent Lola's DAP Hawk as a backup, because helicopters didn't travel alone in case of mechanical failure. That wasn't something Justin worried about much anyway. SOAR's mechanics didn't believe in downtime on a craft. They had the highest aircraft availability stats in the entire U.S. military-if you didn't count Air Force One, which boasted a hundred percent with zero failures ever.

He liked the feeling of the most lethal weapons rotorcraft ever developed having his back. Delta Force Colonel Michael Gibson had also loaded aboard with his sniper rifle, which Justin found doubly comforting. Man like that had your back, you knew your back was covered.

At 0200, the ScanEagle had gone back over the razor-wire-topped perimeter wall to pa.s.s on the operational plan to the trapped team.

At 0210, Justin was hovering close over the dirt five kilometers and ninety seconds to the northwest of the airport. Unlike the impossibly fine sands of Afghanistan that blew up into ma.s.sive brownouts of dust, this dirt was good, old dirt. It blew around a bit, but it stayed on the ground like dirt was supposed to, a big relief.

Lola hung an extra three minutes farther back; this was the Jane's show.

"Who feels the need for a song?"

Carmen started a rap, which wasn't music by any definition Justin ever had.

Along come the Jane, flyin' ever so low, Tellin' the old IDF, just what they can blow.

Talbot picked it up at the port gun.

And while the old Negev, could really use some snow, It's not the sort of place, you'd ever want to go.

Justin gave a shot at a chorus.