CHAPTER 1
What the hell! Dan Malloy groaned in his sleep, his body covered in perspiration, the bedsheets twisted and caught between his lower legs. His breath came hard and fast. It felt as if his heart was going to rip out of his chest, the pounding so loud that it sounded like kettle drums pulsing in his ears. He heard the blades of the MH-47 Night Stalker he was flying. Heard the calm voice of his copilot, Lieutenant Andy Gantry, talking to the Special Forces A team hidden nearby in the inky darkness on a rocky slope in the Hindu Kush mountains. They had been out for nearly three weeks hunting HVTs, high-value targets.
The winds were erratic, trying to toss the bird around. His Nomex gloves were soaked as he gripped the cyclic and collective, his booted feet playing lightly on the rudders, trying to bring the helo in and not crash it.
His teeth ached, he was clenching them so tightly, his entire focus oriented to the green dials in front of him, trying to land safely to pick up the twelve-member team. The weather was stormy and quixotic, trying to throw Dan off course. Below, through his NVGs, he saw the chem lights tossed out by the A team to show him where to land. Sweat trickled down his temples. His nostrils flared as he smelled the kerosene used to power the MH-47. His only focus was landing this damned thing. Lightning flashed, blinding him momentarily.
Shit! Blinking, Dan halted his descent, trying to give his eyes time to adjust.
He knew that Taliban often camped for the night in nearby wadis that ran vertically up and down the rugged slopes of these mountains—and there was one within a thousand feet from where he needed to land. Dan wished for an Apache escort and an overhead drone right about now, but none had been available. A drone had infrared capability and would have been able to pick up the heat signature of anyone hiding nearby. The MH-47 had that same capability, but that instrument went belly up halfway to their assigned LZ, landing zone. Now, they were blind, and it bothered the hell out of him.
Dan mentally cursed, knowing that the inclement weather conditions would have torn the drone apart with the sixty-mile-an-hour wind gusts pummeling his helo, throwing it off course from landing, again and again. The storm was racing directly down at them—and it was a violent son-of-a-bitch. But Night Stalker pilots, the cream of Army aviation, were expected to fly through all weather conditions to pick up a black-ops group. These were brave men and women who got the job done, despite the challenges and potential life-and-death of their assigned mission.
His eyesight came back, and he began to breathe again, nudging his helo forward toward the landing zone once more. In the back of his mind, he knew if Taliban were camped in that nearby wadi that they could throw an RPG and AK-47 bullets at his bird. They would aim for the rotor assembly to stop the blades from turning. The MH-47 had two rotors, and one sat up near the pilot’s cabin, the other was near the rear of the helicopter. If either were hit by a bullet, they’d crash—and they’d all die.
Son-of-a-bitch. He’d been on hellacious missions before, but this one took the cake in his many years of experience. Thunderstorms would pop up at the most unexpected times simply because these dragon-toothed mountains made their own weather. Right now, he was at nine-thousand feet on a steep scree slope. The A team had found the levelest spot for them to land, but it was not level at all. They’d done the best they could, being hotly pursued by Taliban. Landing on a slope was perilous. It was possible, but with a thunderstorm looming over them, and the possibility of tangos in that nearby wadi, Dan knew they were trapped between a rock and a hard place. His chief gunner had the ramp down and was sitting behind the fifty-caliber machine gun, looking for the enemy.
Andy’s calm voice continued to give him directions and elevation. There was so much that could go wrong. His body was so tense Dan thought he might snap in half. His fingers ached, the perspiration making them slippery.
Come on…come on…
He focused again on the chem lights, tiny green dots on the black skin of the mountain slope. The wind gusts were powerful, and the bird shuddered violently. The engines changed and deepened, Andy played with the throttles between their seats, trying to give Dan the power he needed to neutralize the gusts.
Everything slowed down to movie frames for Dan as he eased his reluctant helo forward. Closer and closer, he inched the thumping, vibrating beast toward the LZ. Just let me get to it. Let me land without incident. His ears were keyed to the sound of the engines. The adrenaline raced through his bloodstream, heightening his clarity, making him aware of all sounds, smells, and sensations until his whole world became his senses. It gave him an edge. It allowed his hands to make the subtle moves on the instruments to get the bird on hard ground.
“Over LZ,” Andy reported calmly. “Ten feet…nine feet…eight feet…”
He couldn’t just swiftly plop the helicopter down. No, it had to go carefully, or he’d get into hover-out-of-ground effect, which meant the invisible cushion of air that the helo rode on, was suddenly gone. If that happened, the MH-47 would drop like a rock out of the sky.
“…seven feet…”
God, let me get this bird down. Let me get it down safely.
His hands ached, feeling like a raptor’s claws frozen around the instruments as he prayed to keep that cushion of air between them and the uneven, rugged ground. Sweat stung his eyes, and he blinked furiously, trying to clear his vision.
“…six feet…”
“…five feet…”
“…three feet…”
Dan felt the tires touch the slope.
At the same moment the bird touched down, a seventy-mile-an-hour gust slammed into the helicopter. Instantly, Dan felt the cant to his right, getting knocked over. His feet and hands acted in a blurred dance as he lifted the bird into the air, leaping skyward, trying to stop the blades from churning into the slope, shattering them into hundreds of razor-like pieces. He had no choice but to turn the helo, so the cockpit faced that wadi as he tried to grab ascending air coming up the slope to give him a lift instead of crashing.
Suddenly, the Plexiglas across the cockpit exploded inward. Thousands of small fragments rained down around Dan. He heard Andy give a squawk of surprise.
They were being attacked!
More bullets poured into the cockpit, singing past his helmet. He heard Andy scream. Heard sudden orders being roared to him by the A team on the ground.
And then, the fifty-caliber machine gun blasted through the darkened interior of the bird, hammering like pulses against Dan.
He took a huge risk, dropping the bird six feet. The helo slammed into the ground.
Dan groaned, the harness biting deeply into his shoulders as it hit the rocks. He saw the A team hidden nearby, firing their rifles in the direction of the wadi where the Taliban were attacking. He wanted to curse. There was no time!
The bird bounced up into the air. Dan used every skill he had to control the helicopter’s wobbling hop off the slope. Somehow—God only knew how—he got it back down on the earth, but it wasn’t where he was supposed to land.
More bullets snapped furiously through the cockpit.
Dan felt his right arm, the one holding the cyclic between his legs, go numb. When he tried to move it, there was no response. He felt warm blood pouring down his arm. Tried to force his limb to work. The helo was being brutally hammered with AK-47 fire.
Dan yelled at his two crewmen to egress. He swiftly shut down the engines, seeing Andy slumped to his left, his helmeted head resting on his chest, the harness still holding him in the seat. He needed to escape with Andy.
Suddenly, the whole night lit up with an RPG being fired. It missed the MH-47 by six feet, but the wall of fire raced toward the opened cockpit. Rocks sailed like missiles through the broken Plexiglas, striking Dan.
One moment, he was conscious. The next, his helmet was struck hard, snapping back his head against the seat, the force of it stunning him into semi-consciousness.
Dan heard the A-team leader screaming at him to egress. Groggy, he barely lifted his eyelids, his NVGs still in place. He saw several members of the team sprinting toward the wounded helicopter. They were screwed. This bird wasn’t going to ever get off the ground again. More noise, screams, and orders, filtered through his semi-conscious state. Trying to unsnap the harness, he found his wounded right arm wouldn’t work. Pain raced up the limb as he fumbled with the clip, trying to get it to release. The smell of fuel was everywhere. The blades were slowing down, the engines off. But he hadn’t been able to reach the fuel bladders to shut off the fuel to the engines. Shit. Kerosene was leaking into the helicopter now, the smell making him nauseated. One bullet…one bullet could blow this thing up, and they’d become an instant fireball.
Dan tried weakly to escape but couldn’t. He felt more than saw two A-team members squeezing into the cockpit area. His brain wouldn’t work. He tried to tell them Andy was wounded, but all that came out was a grunt. The pain was so bad that he felt faint from it. Someone leaned over him, instantly releasing the buckle, the harness opening. Whoever it was, quickly helped him get rid of the nylon straps and he was being hauled out of his seat and into the area behind the cockpit.
Dan heard things. A woman’s voice? He knew that voice! It was Sloan Kennedy. What the hell? And then, someone jerked the cord from his helmet out of the ICS, and he heard nothing more. Bullets were snapping and flying all around them. The helmet protected Dan’s ears up to a point; all sounds were muffled. He couldn’t make out what was being said by the two soldiers who were dragging his sorry ass out of that helo, trying to save his life. And then, Dan lost consciousness because his wounded arm slammed into the opened door, the agony arcing upward, swallowing him whole.
Dan jerked into an upright position on his soaked bed, breathing in ragged, harsh gasps. He pushed his shaking fingers through his short black hair. Moonlight filtered through his second-story apartment. A commercial jet was taking off from the airport nearby, the sound of the engines vibrating through the thin glass of the open window near his bed.
Fuck!
He got up and gripped the dresser nearby, hanging his head. All of the emotions he felt the night of the crash coming back, gutting him once again. He needed a cold beer. Dan glared at the clock on the dresser. It was three a.m. He forced himself out of the tiny bedroom and down the narrow hall to the bathroom. He stunk of fear, sweat still rolling down his chest, the adrenaline making him feel like someone had ripped the skin off his body, leaving him vulnerable to everything about that crash years earlier.
Would the crash ever stop replaying in his dreams? Dan fumbled for the light switch. The bathroom was small, like everything else about this apartment. A cockroach raced up the yellowed wall opposite the plastic-enclosed shower stall. He slammed his palm against it, killing it. The little bastard. The apartment swam with cockroaches. They infested everything, no matter what he did. Never mind the landlord piled garbage outside the building half a story high, and the garbage truck never came around once a week, as it should. He hated Sudan for its lack of basic cleanliness. But it was better than the alternative. People lived in grass huts with dirt floors around them in most places. Here, at the port on the Red Sea, there were stucco homes, but only the rich could afford them. Everywhere else it was squalor, and tents made from pieces of corrugated aluminum. He’d seen this in Afghanistan. Now here.
Dan wanted that beer—he craved it—but he needed a shower first. He felt hot, sweaty, and fevered, turning on the tap for cold water. In October, the heat in Sudan still climbed into the eighties during the day and hovered near seventy-five at night. His air conditioner, if it could be called that, was barely working.
The tap water was tepid but felt damned good as it poured over him. He tipped his head up, eyes closed, his hands on either side of the stall to stop himself from falling because his knees were still shaking. Dan appreciated the water like it was life itself—and in Sudan water was life in this mostly desert country.
He opened his eyes because when they were closed, it dragged him back into the crash—the smells, the sounds, the icy coldness biting into his flight suit covered body. He shook with tension, his breath slowing, but still uneven as he oriented himself to the here and now.
This fucking nightmare always hit at full moon time, at least once, sometimes twice in a seven-day period. Those nights were raw, and he bled from his soul. Hot tears jammed into his eyes, and he pressed his brow against the shower stall, closing them, their salty trails spilling into the corners of his opened mouth. He never cried. Not ever. But every time the nightmare happened, he cried no matter how hard he fought against it.
Because of him, Andy had died in that crash when an AK-47 bullet struck his chest. Both A-team medics tried to save his life as the firefight blazed around them, but it was no use.
Jesus.
He was passed out as two of the Special Forces team members carried him out of that helo. He’d awakened minutes later, one medic working over him, the other, working over Andy. Dan could still hear Andy’s gasps and cries. He would never forget that night or the pleading from Andy. That crash was his fault.
His wife Sable was without husband now and their two little girls, Olivia and Karen, without a father. His two crewmen in the rear had also been injured, but not half as bad as Andy and Dan. Andy died an hour later. The rest of them survived to remember it.
God, if only I’d hammered that bird to the ground. Why didn’t I?
Dan felt destroyed by that one question. If he’d stuck the bird, the Taliban wouldn’t have had the target they acquired. Their bullets would have hit the rear side of the helo. Everyone would have been protected to a degree. Andy would still be alive.
He was such a fuck up.
Sometimes, he wanted to die. These nightmares tore at his shattered soul and made him feel so damned helpless. Hope had left him long ago. He woke up in the morning knowing it was just one more day and he didn’t even feel the energy he needed to live through it. The beer always helped. Two or three cans took that hopelessness away from him, lifted him a little, and then he could focus on something positive, instead. That got him through the day—and that’s all he could handle was one day at a time.
He dried himself off with a towel and wrapped it around his hips, padding on bare, wet feet into the tiny kitchen. The apartment wasn’t more than eight-hundred square feet. Dan often thought the cockroaches owned half of it. They skittered and scurried as he walked down the grimy wooden floor. This place was a mess—but so was he. It reflected him well enough, Dan thought, jerking open the door to the refrigerator.
The light made him wince as he reached in and grabbed a can of beer. Slamming the door shut, he ripped off the tab and gulped down half the can, the beer hitting his tense, knotted belly. Dan moved over to the only window in the living room and pushed the curtains aside, staring out toward the airport. As far as airports go, it wasn’t much—although the red granite floors within the terminal were clean and highly polished. Someone in Sudan was trying to replicate first-world expectations when people disembarked from a flight. His upper lip curled. Visitors would find out very quickly that the cleanliness of the terminal was not outside those swinging glass doors. This port was busy, and all kinds of commodities were traded with the rest of this part of the world. The odors, when the wind was right, were overwhelming to the sensitized noses of visitors. They hurried to get the hell away from the port because it was raw, real, and visceral. The suffering human condition was everywhere. It couldn’t be avoided.
Dan decided a long time ago that Port Sudan was an outer reflection of how he felt inside. He tipped his head back, finishing off the first can. His knees were almost solid now, and his heart had stopped floundering in his chest. He went and got a second can from the fridge and returned to the window, looking again at the lights of the airport. Beyond it lay the busy, twenty-four-hour-a-day shipping port. Dan could see the bright yellow lights on top of big gantries and cranes that moved the metal shipping containers off arriving ships. His gaze moved down the shoreline of the city to another area where ships came to fill their bellies with Sudanese oil from the southern jungle portion of the country. There were also natural gas terminals where ships with huge, round metal containers bolted down on a deck were pumped full for a trek to Europe. Beyond that were the stockyards where cattle were herded onto other ships to be taken all over the Middle East for slaughter or to be sold as breeding stock.
The second can of beer began to combat the anxiety that flooded his body. Dan knew that in a few minutes, he’d start the adrenaline crash. He’d feel weak and exhausted. Finishing the beer, he went for a third one. This time, he sat on the worn, red cotton couch. The cushion groaned under his weight, and he eased his back against the end of it, pulled up one of his feet, and rested the other on the threadbare Persian rug.
Sipping the third brew, feeling the fingers of alcohol start to numb out the restless torrent of emotions still holding him prisoner, Dan closed his eyes, the cold beer resting against his thigh. The coldness felt good, focused him, and made him feel less hopeless. It was a damned good thing he had nothing on the schedule for the next six days. It usually took him three days to get over this virulent nightmare. He didn’t want to fly the Delos Charities CH-47 anywhere when he was in this state. The damned nightmare grounded him, and he was like a bird with a broken wing. Sometimes, if the Delos medical schedule conflicted with an unexpected nightmare, Dan would cancel it and reschedule. He knew it caused a lot of problems for the charity and the villages in desperate need of medical attention for their people, but he couldn’t help it. There was no way in hell he was going to fly and put a medical team at risk when he was in this broken state.
Dan would take the heat from the Delos home office, instead. He knew they got frustrated with him, but he wasn’t about to tell them why he arbitrarily canceled a flight out of the blue. If they knew the truth of what he’d done, his lousy flight skills, they wouldn’t have hired him two years ago. But he’d been in a good space at that time, the nightmare leaving him alone. And when he was solid like that, he could fool the world. He’d walked confidently into Dilara Culver’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, and given her one hell of an employment interview. Dan knew he was good at putting on that game face and pretending to be what he wasn’t.
He liked Dilara. She was a good woman—heart-centered. In fact, Dan felt a ray of hope when she hired him as a helicopter pilot for Delos Charities to ferry food, clothing, and medical teams, all over Sudan. Dilara reminded him of Andy’s wife, Sable—that same warm, nurturing personality. It was something he craved—something he didn’t own and never would. The only other woman with that same healing personality was Sloan Kennedy.
Sloan…
Dan missed her so damned much he couldn’t put it into words. He’d met her at Bagram, at a canteen. She was an 18 Delta combat medic attached to a Special Forces A team, one of the few women in that role. But damn, that woman knocked him off his feet, grabbed his heart, and never let it go.
Closing his eyes, he finished off the last of his beer. Just thinking about Sloan again, about their torrid affair with one another, made him feel hope. But the crash changed everything. Stretching out on the old couch, he pushed his legs to the other end of it, settling his head against the arm of the sofa. He closed his eyes.
Sloan…
Even as he was coming out of the worst of his nightmare, he remembered their love affair. He pictured Sloan’s oval face, those kind, understanding gray eyes. He could still feel her long fingers sliding across his body. She had poured all her nurturing care into him, and it made the dirtiness, the terror, and shame he carried, dissolve. And she’d been his until he’d been an asshole, and walked out of her life without an explanation. He had no one to blame but himself. Like everything else in his life, he destroyed the good.
Dragging in a ragged breath, Dan felt sleep taking hold of him again. Sloan…I miss you so damned much. I wish I hadn’t been such a coward…I’m sorry I hurt you. You saved my life that night. You and your team. And I repaid you by walking out of your life and never telling you why.
Grief slid through him, wrapping around his slowly beating heart—grief over losing Sloan. She had been so damned special, and cool and calm in a firefight. He could still remember her whispering words of hope in his ear as she’d leaned over him, trying to stop the bleeding from his shattered right arm that night. Dan knew he was bleeding out from that bullet wound he’d sustained in the cockpit. They could have all died that night, but the captain of the A team got them out of there and into one of the thousands of limestone caves that peppered the Hindu Kush, hiding them from the Taliban.
Dan remembered everything from the days in those darkened caves. The Taliban were crawling around the mountains, hunting them. If the Army tried to send another helo in to rescue their sorry asses, it would have been destroyed.
Through it all, Sloan had tended him. They had been lovers for a year and a half before that, still going together when Dan crashed and got wounded.
The last thing Dan thought as he drifted off into an exhausted sleep was that the joke was on him. It was all his fault, and he ended up living to remember it all—every last detail of that night whether he wanted to or not.