Chapter 5
“What the hell?” Abby’s gut clenched as several warnings flashed simultaneously inside her visor. Several categories of threat sensors had just freaked out.
A fast-mover jet slicing in from the south, barely above their own flight level.
She called her lone Little Bird escort. “Inbound on our six. Target and prepare to fire.”
“On it.” They were already spun around and flying fast for a head-on with the jet, not that they stood a chance. She could definitely get to like that Little Bird pilot.
A message flashed down from above—but not on the satellite radio. It was local with no apparent point of origin.
“Flight Charlene One, this is Overwatch. The in-bound is a CCA. Do not fire.”
She could feel Ethan freeze on the controls.
She wiggled the cyclic slightly, and he flinched.
Not enough to affect the flight, but enough that she could feel it through the controls.
Then she felt him resume controlled flight.
The whole interchange had lasted no more than a second or two, but when flying NOE—nap of Earth—at nearly three hundred klicks, errors were typically measured in tenths of a second.
Abby gave him the moment to say he was sorry, which he did by not saying anything. And she replied the same. They’d flown together long enough that much of what needed saying didn’t need to be said.
“Who the hell is flying that thing?” Abby felt the itch between her shoulder blades like a hard-driven knife blade, which must have been what snapped Ethan’s attention out of piloting mode—he got a little intense and hyper-focused, even by her standards.
“I thought the Collaborative Combat Aircraft were still in basic flight testing. Someone please tell me that isn’t an armed autonomous AI drone flying beside me. ”
It must be the Anduril YFQ-44 by its standard inverted-T tail and thin wings. They weren’t even through the first flight test as far as she knew, yet the long thin fuselage of the aircraft flying beside them matched the specs she’d been studying for the fun of it.
“I could tell you, but that might spoil the fun.” Mr. D-boy. Mr. I’m-too-cool Delta operator. They were cool…and scary as could be.
“Go ahead, spoil the fun.”
“There’s a 24th STS dude embedded with our Delta team. Never told us why he was here. Guessing that’s why.”
They were the Air Force’s contribution to the Tier One teams of Joint Special Operations Command.
The Army contributed Delta and the Navy stood up DEVGRU, which everyone except the Department of Dense knew as SEAL Team 6.
The 24th Special Tactics Squadron were definitely good guys to have around.
Whether you needed a precision air strike or someone to run a couple hundred supply flights per hour into a recently captured airport using nothing more than a handheld radio and an apple crate to sit on, they were the guys.
“Turns out he’s not the one actually flying it.”
Abby could hear the tease and refused to rise to the bait as she watched the CCA slide into formation to the side where she’d lost the Little Bird…and a little ahead.
Derek waited.
She didn’t have time for a guessing game in a combat situation, not even during a simulated one.
Unless it wasn’t a guessing game. The STS dude wasn’t here to fly it, which meant he was only here as a safety pilot to monitor it in case the stupid thing’s brain went kerflooey.
It wasn’t a nicely useful drone—the damn jet was flying itself.
Using its own unknown set of programming and misconceptions.
“Well, isn’t that just Jimmies on an Italian?”
“Who on a what?” Ethan had given up asking long ago, but Derek fell for the trap.
“Jimmies, you know, those sprinkles on ice cream. Chocolate ones are the only real ones by the way, just in case you ever buy me an ice cream.”
“O-kay.” Not being stupid—Delta meant he was very, very smart—his tone said he knew he had one foot in the trap. “What’s with sprinkles on a person?”
Her trap snapped closed in her thoughts with a bright snick! “An Italian, or an Italian Ice to the uninitiated, is called a snow cone in the more heathen parts of this fine nation.”
“Heathen. Like any state that isn’t Vermont?”
“Downeast.” She slashed at him. “The great state of Maine. Never insult me like that again.” Then she heard his chuckle over the intercom. Yep, he’d already paid her back for her trap.
“Yes ma’am,” he sassed her. In her peripheral vision, where it wasn’t blocked by her helmet, she saw his hand sweep up into a sharp salute.
“So, having an experimental Air Force CCA horn in on a Night Stalkers’ training mission is about as logical as chocolate sprinkles on a snow cone.
Got it! But if that’s the case, how do you explain my team being here? ”
“What do you call a moose with no friends?” She let him stew on that while she looked again for whatever was flying overwatch from somewhere above them.
Until the CCA showed up, this had been a strictly Army operation.
No longer. Which meant that in addition to one of their own Gray Eagle drones, it could be any of the standard sentry birds—a Navy E-2 Hawkeye, P-8 Poseidon, or the like.
Except those would show up clearly. Yet another drone?
If so, it was a stealth bird without even a hint on her extremely sensitive threat radar.
“No matter what I say, I’ll be wrong,” Derek finally conceded.
“It be alone-some.” She gave it her best Downeast dry tone.
Mainiacs were prone-some to tacking some onto words in the strangest ways.
At least according to anyone from away—those who didn’t have the God-given gift of being born in the greatest state.
To her ear, it was a quantifier of more, or less, but a little more than less.
“So, my team and I are here because…what, we don’t have any friends?”
“Oh, the man is sharp.”
Ethan laughed, and Derek joined in with that good chuckle of his.
“We still have our uses.”
Abby glanced over in time to see Derek make a gesture to the men behind him. Seconds later, a request came up on her visor to permit a data link.
“That you?” Certain things you didn’t mess with, and letting strangers into her helo’s systems was one of them.
“STS,” Derek confirmed.
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.