Page 5 of Mending Fences

He reluctantly handed his own helmet off to the crew chiefs seated behind them and, thankfully, Stick’s helmet proved to be a decent match. Plugging in the umbilical to link him to the helo’s systems, a few steps to focus the projections on the inside of the visor, and he was good to go.

Despite the helmet, he was still no Night Stalker—and she’d have to keep that in mind. But the cockpit was familiar to both of them and they soon settled into the engine start and pre-departure checklists.

For the next forty-five minutes, she followed Major Justin Roberts’ instructions and wrung her out a bit. It wasn’t that the Stealth Hawk was less responsive than a Black Hawk, it was more that it was differently responsive. Also, even through her helmet, the sounds were strange, though that feeling faded fast enough. Climb, descend, sideslip, auto-rotate, twist on the axis of her main rotor, rolls, emergency landings onto the deck (both soft and hard), and everything else she could think of.

She was also putting Fence through his paces. At first, it was simple tasks like seamlessly passing control back and forth. Then performing the same tasks under extreme circumstances, as if she was hit and taken out of action during an emergency landing or an attack run.

This was a transport Hawk, not the Direct-Action Penetrator gunship, but it still had far more advanced electronics than a Navy Seahawk. But he soon mastered most of that as well as Stick ever had. What he lacked in training, he made up for with instinct. As the flight progressed, she had to explain less and less until they were flying as close to silence as she ever did.

For the final ten minutes, she had him do one of the hardest tricks for a pilot. She dialed up the opacity on his helmet visor—on-demand blackout was a new feature. “Now, you have to trust the readouts inside your visor completely. No outside view. No console view.”

“What the hell, Fin?”

“Someone pings us with a laser, you don’t want them finding your eyes.”

And for ten minutes, he struggled against instinct to settle into the strange world of pure heads-up instrument flying.

By the time they were ghosting back down onto the deck, she was wondering why he’d never been picked out by the 160th’s recruiters. Sure he was Navy but…

“Well done, Fence.”

“Kee-rist, Fin. Where did they teach you to do that kind of flying?”

“Did you already forget what I said about flying Army?”

He wiped his forehead after removing his helmet. “I’ve been watching these guys?—”

“And gals.”

“—and gals fly for the last six months. Never caught a tenth of what they were up to.”

“You did better than I expected, even with the major’s recommendation. We’ll see what happens when we hit land or if the situation goes south.” The surprise that she wouldn’t be sharing with Fence anytime soon, was how effortless he was to fly with. As if their past had given them a shared shorthand and understanding. A sympatico she hadn’t known she was missing until she flew with him.

“You do this every day, Finella?”

“Not every day.”

Instead of groaning, he looked intrigued. How little did the Navy use someone with his skills?

4

Not every day? Tom didn’t have a good answer to that. He flew plenty, by Navy standards. Anti-sub patrol, SAR, practice and training flights. But not every day? He was thrilled when he flew more than a few times a week.

And the flying itself!

He’d never even conceived of, much less tried, a third of the maneuvers that Fin had put them through. Her pointers on his technique were like gold. He finally realized that he just might have found that next-level challenge he’d been looking for—without realizing he was looking for it. That it had arrived in the form of his teenage lover rated as a pure bonus.

By the time they returned, three more birds were being prepped on deck. In the briefing room, the space was crowded. Pilots, crew chiefs, and a six-man Delta Force action team. He picked out the ship’s captain sitting at a desk that made this his deck-level office when it wasn’t cluttered with a mission briefing. They traded salutes.

“Bit of a sticky wicket, but we much appreciate your filling in, Lieutenant.”

“My pleasure, Commander Ramis.” Because there was nothing else to say to your arcane commanding officer who thought this was a Victorian-era British Ship of the Line instead of an American warship.

“Time!” Kara called out. He checked his watch, twenty seconds past the hour. He must be running fast because nobody was as punctual as a Night Stalker. Sure enough, the big readout on the wall blinked to exactly the hour the moment he glanced at it—as if she’d anticipated even that brief delay in normal human cognition.

“You ready, Fin? Gets real now,” he whispered to her as he dropped onto a sofa between her at one end and a massive Delta Force operator at the other.

“This is my jam, Fence.”

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