Night Stalkers: By Break Of Day Part 30

Recounting each moment. Second by second.

Clear.

Cold.

She'd been teased enough times by Carlo the opera singer about her heart being frozen against him.

It was frozen now as she offered a chill retelling of the facts. If there were any emotions, she was past feeling them. Maybe later the pain would return, but for now it was banished into some steel vault deep within her. Lost behind the high fences that she had denied to Jus- Shove the thought aside.

Continue the debrief!

So she did.

When she was done, she hung her head. Then she saw that she still wore the beautiful boots that Justin had given her.

Kara tested for feelings, like poking cautiously at a sore tooth, but nothing happened. No regrets, no shock-they were simply pretty boots that someone had given her.

Shock.

She was in shock.

Great. She absolutely needed another problem for her brain to work on at the moment.

"I can show you the tapes. I have every second of it on tactical display down in the"-she couldn't manage coffin-"ground control station."

"We'll need to look at those," Lola commented. "As soon as we can. I need to understand how we lost a fifty-million-dollar helo and her five-person crew."

Kara wanted to find offense. Wanted to find Lola more concerned about the money and equipment than the people, but even in her current condition, she knew better. Which told her something about her own mental state.

"Let's do it now while I'm still too numb to care."

Connie squeezed her hand, but it made little difference. Connie's husband was still alive and waiting for her when this was over.

Kara had finally learned exactly what it meant to forward deploy into a battle zone. The man closest to you could die between one moment and the next.

But how many soldiers had pulled the trigger on their teammate themselves?

It was early evening as they all trooped down to the coffin on the Peleliu's hangar deck. Somehow Kara slept through the day, her body shutting down to protect her.

Well, for now her brain was still shut down and she was glad of it.

Major Wilson was waiting for her. He went to pull her aside. "Kara, honey. I need to get into the ground control station and Sergeant Marquez wouldn't let me in without your clearance. C'mon, let's go."

Kara looked down at where his hand was clamped possessively around her upper arm.

He turned to face the women who'd accompanied Kara from her berth. "Thanks for getting her here, but this is a secure area and secure information." Wilson began dragging her over to the keypad of the door lock as if he was trying to hustle her out of the way before the women could react.

Well, Kara still had her sidearm.

Once again she had it out and the safety off before she knew what she was doing. She tucked it up under his chin and pressed hard enough that all he managed was a startled "Gurk!" as he tipped his head back.

"Way over the line, Wilson. Now go away, honey, before I kill an officer. I've already done it once today."

He tried a protest that might have started with court martial, but he couldn't speak past the additional upward pressure she applied.

Major Wilson finally backed off, spewing imprecations about cla.s.sified information and getting Lieutenant Commander Boyd Ramis down here to arrest her and confiscate all her data.

As if Kara had anything left to lose.

Once he was gone, she put away her sidearm and unlocked the door.

"s.h.i.t, girlfriend." Trisha clapped her on the back just the way a guy would. "Knew there was a reason I liked you."

The others laughed.

Kara didn't.

They watched the tape in silence.

Then they went back and watched it again, discussing flight paths and angles of attack.

Kara felt an itch.

Halfway through the third replay, there was a pounding on the coffin's door. She delegated the unwelcome intrusion to Lola as the leader of the 5D to go deal with Ramis and whoever else Wilson was dragging into this mess.

Words she couldn't quite make out. Ramis's thoughtful ones, cut off by a spate of diatribe from Wilson.

It started to sound ugly and then everything went quiet.

Then Michael's voice. Soft. Two words, but perfectly clear. "Back. Off."

There was no argument.

Claudia sighed happily. "I do love that man."

The door clanged shut once more.

Kara ignored the brief spurt of pain as Lola returned with Colonel Gibson in tow. Claudia kissed her husband, and Kara turned away to restart the tape.

Trisha started back in making some point about the angle of attack.

Kara cut Trisha off mid-sentence by rewinding the tape and letting it roll again from the moment of the attack.

The shoot down.

The helo's pa.s.sage over the crash sites as the miniguns continued to pound the downed aircraft.

The slow, lumbering turn toward the air base.

"What are you doing, Justin?"

The others watched in silence.

The helo didn't twist like some G.o.dd.a.m.n light-footed rodeo pony.

It-what was the word she'd just thought? Her brain was moving like mud. Just like the helo.

"It's lumbering. Justin never flew like that a day of his life."

The slow course change toward the American side of the camp. An overcorrection before landing back on course.

She brought up the vector a.n.a.lysis routine and watched his speed increase. The acceleration was agonizingly slow for a SOAR pilot.

"That isn't Justin flying," Lola said before Kara could. "I've flown beside him too many times."

"Nor Danny," Trisha put in. "I took him up in my Little Bird for some cross-training and he's pretty hot s.h.i.t at the helm. Look, there. No dip down to follow the ground contour."

"Was he dazed?"

"No."

"Path is too straight, no wobble. It's just not a SOAR-level skilled pilot."

The voices were pinging around her.

"One of the crew chiefs?"

"Why would they fly to attack the base?"

"It wasn't Justin or his crew at all." Kara's declaration silenced the room. She wasn't expressing hope; it was fact. They might have already been dead, bleeding out on the cargo deck of the Chinook, but no one from SOAR had been at those controls.

None of the actions made sense. The flight style characteristics weren't Justin's. The murders of the IDF jets and their pilots weren't the actions of a SOAR crew. Even if one of them was a sleeper agent, that wouldn't explain the coordinated effort necessary to capture a Chinook, fly it, and kill the two jets.

"How far back in time does your video go?" Connie asked close beside her, hand still on Kara's shoulder.

"All the way."

Kara wound it back once again, jumping quickly to the moment of the attack and then slowing the rewind speed.

She zoomed out to a wide view as the helo and the two jets retreated backwards across the sky. When the jets disappeared, reversing up the Central Negev, she followed the helo instead.

Even in rewind, she could see that it wasn't flown by a SOAR pilot. Whoever it was knew the craft and how to guide her, but while maneuvering they didn't hug terrain or ease into deep wadis. They were keeping a ridge between the helo and the approaching jets, but they weren't doing a very good job of it.

Good enough, she supposed the two dead pilots would protest.

A road. Some low buildings. The geometric shapes of limestone walls that she recognized as the Avdat World Heritage Site ruins.

The helo reversed back into the courtyard, an awkward, uneven motion.

The bright sparks of the rotor blade tips striking airborne dust painted two circles of light. As the rotors slowed, the circles dimmed, then disappeared.

She let it run backward for a long time at ten times speed.

"Can you zoom in any tighter?"

Kara shook her head. They were looking at a tiny segment of the ScanEagle's wide-angle video from four miles high. The whole helicopter was little bigger than her palm in the center of the image, one pixel per meter more or less. The walls of the courtyard made a visible square. Beyond that, nothing but dark, cold desert-black under infrared light.

Everyone watched the unchanging image in silence until the rotor disks spun back to life and the helo was once again airborne backwards. The motion of the flight was wholly different.

"That's Justin," she managed without her voice cracking. "He was still alive at zero-zero-eight hours last night when he landed there."

"So what happened between eight minutes after midnight and one-ten hours?" Connie asked. Her voice was so calm, it was the only thing that kept Kara from flying apart.

She reached out to brush her fingers over the cold gla.s.s of the screen, but felt closer to Justin for the gesture. Past hope, it was perhaps as close as she'd ever be to him again.

Kara ran the hour and two minutes of video that the helicopter had spent parked on the ground at four times normal speed. For fifteen and a half minutes, the only sound in the coffin was the shuffling of feet.

Nothing.

She wound it back to Justin's landing and let it play forward in real-time speed.

"At this distance, it is unlikely that the camera can pick up an individual's heat signature unless they are all gathered together." Kara switched off the coffin's lights so that she could see the main screen that little bit more clearly.

She could feel the others gather more closely behind her. She tried to draw comfort from that but- "What's that?" The silhouette of Trisha's pointing hand was outlined against the screen, but Kara had already hit the pause and was rolling the pixelated image back frame by frame.

"Pilot side," Lola noted.

Sure enough, the vague bright spot, sometimes two pixels across, sometimes one, shifted back toward the pilot's side door as she rolled backward.

His last steps?

She flipped from infrared to normal light view, which should have shown nothing in the dead of night.

The black helicopter disappeared into the darkness.

But the bright spot grew brighter.

Her heart beat for the first time in what felt like forever.

Only one thing she knew of on the helicopter that would reflect starlight more brightly than it radiated heat.

She began scrolling forward frame by frame, synchronizing the two views.