Tuesday, Forward Operating Base, Iraq
“Scramble. Scramble. Scramble.”
The PA system’s bright tinny voice yanked Lieutenant Christen Davidson from her curled-up sleep. She found herself standing on the unfinished planks next to her bunk before her eyelids could even pry open. As her feet hit the floor, she crisscrossed her arms and jerked her t-shirt up over her head. Her flight uniform lay draped over the headboard in such a way that there would be no fumbling as adrenaline, Christen’s drug of choice, shot excitement through her system.
She scratched her fingers through her short pixie-cut hair, the most she would do to make herself presentable. Vanity was a time suck. Christen’s time was spent piling special forces operators into the back of her heli and flying them into the fray. They depended on her. Missions and lives were at stake – they were her priority.
Perched on the edge of her cot behind the makeshift privacy curtain formed from a queen-sized striped sheet, Christen pulled on her clothes, yanked the laces of her flight boots, and quickly looped a bow. With a shove of the door, she shot herself into the daylight. The sun glared in her eyes as she ran full-tilt toward the command tent to get her orders.
Christen wasn’t normally awake this time of day and didn’t normally fly in sunlight. She was a member of the Night Stalkers, the Army’s 160th. She was one of the only female pilots in what had been, up until very recently, the only special forces unit that allowed women to apply. She’d earned her place. Anything the male pilots could do, she could do too—maybe better, maybe not. Everyone had their strengths and their weaknesses.
Christen’s strength was flying low altitude flights in the black of night, hugging the terrain, glossing over its surface, scaring the hell out of the people below her while hiding her customers from any enemy eyes that might be scanning the midnight sky. She’d trained long and hard, year after year. She’d logged hundreds of hours — every hour she could possibly fly, any thing she could find to fly.
These last five years, she had flown in every kind of weather, terrain, and impossible-to-survive scenario her commanders at the 160th SOAR(A) at Fort Campbell could contrive. Before this last deployment, she’d received her change of status. She was fully mission qualified. She could go on any assignment required of her – bar none. But daylight? —Christen looked up at the sun as she reached to pull the command tent door open— that’s not what Night Stalkers did. This was odd, something was off.
Christen stopped short when she saw her commander barreling toward her.
“Let’s move it, Lieutenant.” The colonel growled as he strode through the door she held wide. He thrust a clipboard of papers at her, then pointed toward the Little Bird helicopter across the field getting fueled. The tanker truck was positioned far enough away that if an enemy combatant wanted to set it on fire, it wouldn’t explode the whole Forward Operating Base, situated just this side of enemy-held territory.
A line of Delta operators formed to her left, with their long hair and bushy beards. The “quiet professionals”—latent death and destruction. Each one laden with weapons, fully geared up in their battle rattle. Christen wondered when they’d flown in. They weren’t on base when she’d gone to sleep. The Deltas stepped, one at a time, onto a bathroom scale and one of their group noted each man’s weight on their clipboard. Weight mattered to the speed and the dexterity of a helicopter’s maneuvers. If they were being that precise, this wasn’t a taxi ride.
Christen looked down at her flight plan, and blinked. What the… “What?” She held a hand up to shield her eyes and read her orders again. She flipped to the waypoints marked on her map and the GPS coordinates she knew were already loaded into her flight computer system. Wow.
“I’m not sending you out on a Sunday picnic.” Colonel Martin stabbed a finger into her shoulder. “You’re our precision flier. Guts forged out of steel, I told ’em. And now, you’re going to make sure I don’t regret putting my reputation behind you.”
It was uncharacteristic of the colonel to point to any one pilot — to lift them up, or set them apart in any manner from the rest of the Night Stalkers. Christen didn’t like it. She was a team player, period. She didn’t seek out and didn’t want flattery or recognition. She just wanted to do her job.
And with or without any added pressure, this was going to be one hell of a trick-shot. Christen’s gaze scanned down the fuel calculations. With her tank filled to spill—depending on the weight of the Deltas, and the opposing wind speeds—she had a little over a two hundred sixty-mile range. With the calculated hover time... Yeah, this was shaving it close. She turned the page to find the weather read-out, then glanced up again at the bright sunshine, not a cloud in the sky. Of course, here in the desert that could change in the blink of an eye – no matter what the weather report said. Haboobs came when they wanted to. These violent winds carrying blinding dirt and debris could choke an engine and put a bird nose down in the sand quicker than quick. Sunlight, though, totally sucked. She wished they’d let her do this at night when she was in her comfort zone.
Like a vampire, Christen thrived after the sun went down. The 160th Night Stalkers loved the pitch-black of moonless nights. With their FLIR—forward looking infrared systems—and their night vision goggles along with some rad computer systems, she could sweep over the terrain, almost undetectable, to deliver her customers to the required spot, arriving on time and on target in plus or minus thirty seconds. It was the precision that her customers demanded. The Night Stalkers were the air support for the United States Special Operations units.
The 160th had flown the Osama bin Laden mission which had been planned and trained for to the Nth degree. Even with the technical problems, that mission could only be seen as a success of vital importance. The 160th had also been the team that zoomed their way into the Hindu Kush Region of Afghanistan when the call was made for an immediate extraction after a SEAL team came under heavy fire during Operation Red Wings. The Night Stalkers in their CH-47 Chinook helicopters took off without a gunship escort, hoping against hope to extract the team in time. The Taliban shot down one of the Night Stalker’s helicopters with a rocket propelled grenade, killing the eight Navy SEALs and eight special operations aviators on board. The second helicopter was forced to leave the scene. It was a soul-crushing horror of a day. It was the day Christen swore she’d become a Night Stalker, dedicating her work to the memory of those fallen warriors.
Christen chewed on her upper lip, reading over her orders to fly straight into the center of a populated city. She visualized the scene in her mind. This kind of challenge was exactly what she’d signed up for. She reached around and hooked a hand behind the back of her neck as she processed the schematics. The road width with the apron of sidewalks and parking lanes on either side was marked on the satellite photo as thirty-one feet five inches. Her rotor diameter was twenty-seven feet four inches. Could she trust these calculations?
Whew! This was going to be one hell of a hairy mission. She’d never trained for this. Never imagined it. Wasn’t completely convinced it was possible. But damned, she was glad she was given the opportunity to try.
Typically, they’d sit down and plot this out meticulously. They’d practice, practice, practice until go-time, working to find any holes and plug them. But this time, she didn’t get to sit down in the wooden chairs and participate in the mission planning. They were spooling up with the pressure of some undefined time constraint. Papers slapped into her hands. There must be an imminent threat. A small window of opportunity.
Christen turned as her stick buddy, Nick Campbell moved up beside her and read their paperwork over her shoulder. A low whistle blew between his teeth. “How many customers are we taking in our bird?”
“We have four. The Deltas are checking their weight now to make sure we’re well below the max takeoff load. The Black Hawk will have the rest of the customers and the heavier fire power.”
“I guess we’re glad they’ve got our backs.” His gaze scanned over to the Black Hawk. “I hope they have all the fire power they can cram on there. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.” He tucked his helmet under his arm and grinned. “It’s a good day to die.” He raised a hand toward their clients and went to do his pre-flight checks.