Page 7 of Mending Fences

“The briefing said to come in low,” she offered him as she leveled out three meters off the ocean’s surface and raced away from the Peleliu. “And nobody flies low like a Night Stalker.”

“Right.” His tone said she’d pay for that one later. Excellent.

6

He couldn’t decide if Fin was a lunatic or simply enjoyed messing with him. Then he thumbed the control to change the view projected inside his visor. One of the most amazing features of the bird was an all-around external camera. He could look in any direction and see the surroundings as if he sat in mid-air with no helo wrapped around him, all in fully enhanced night vision.

They were the lead bird on tonight’s mission, but they weren’t alone. A Direct-Action Penetrator, the gunship version of their Black Hawk, flew two rotor diameters behind them. The tiny two-person MH-6 Little Birds flew to either side, making a tight diamond formation.

He’d flown his search-and-rescue bird into several tight situations with a couple of Marine Corps Cobra gunships watching his back. But it hadn’t felt like this. These four birds were so close together and in such perfect sync that they’d look like a single radar blip—if they weren’t so heavily masked for stealth. And just like Fin, they all flew a bare three meters above the wavetops rolling along the Gulf of Aden.

He flipped back to the tactical view.

“How can you make sense of this?” What he could only describe as cacophony danced across the inside of his visor. Their familiarization flight had been about handling the bird. Not handling the tsunami of data.

Now?

He could interpret only the tiniest bit of the display at a time.

There lay the ocean and the Djibouti shore actually below the watery horizon, in the wireframe view anyway. Flying with the wheels at three meters, put their heads at about five. That placed the theoretical Earth horizon at eight kilometers with perfect seeing. At night, broken up by waves and haze, perhaps five klicks. They were twenty klicks out, so the wireframe outline of the low shoreline weirdly lay below the water horizon on his visor. Over top of all that was projected the night-vision view, which looked like what it was—a whole lot of water.

None of that was the problem.

Superimposed in the center was navigation information. Down the left, engine status. And down the right, a whole lot of blanks under the heading Weapons. They could fit missiles, auto-cannons, and other nastiness, but right now they were rigged as a transport bird, with the only weapons being the two side-facing Miniguns in the hands of the two crew chiefs seated behind them. But projected across the top was all the data about incoming threats (none at the moment), and the bottom showed defensive capability status (full loads of chaff and flares), and…who knew what all.

“Oh, sorry. Select the third option on the menu display.”

He did, and three-quarters of the noise went away or dimmed out until needed. “Do you actually use that other setting?”

“Using it now. It’s a learned skill,” Fin said, as if splitting your brain into a dozen pieces was somehow normal.

He knew what to do with Finella. Even had some ideas about Fin, some definite ideas. Captain Hyland was a damned mystery. “What are we headed into?”

“Be nice if we knew that bit, wouldn’t it?”

“Are we under-briefed?” He’d once had a commander who never provided sufficient information, and how their crews had survived those fiascos was more miracle than luck.

“No.” She swung north to avoid a small boat by several kilometers, which brought a big cargo ship into distant view. Hopefully the Yemeni weren’t targeting it.

Their actions had emptied the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Nine-tenths of the Suez traffic was now circling the Cape of Good Hope at the south tip of Africa. That added about two weeks to their passage and increased transit costs by half again. Supply lines all over Europe and the Eastern US were shredding daily, all because of a bunch of yahoos armed with Iranian rockets and a corrupted view of the Koran.

“We were briefed with all they know. You’ll see. Think more about flexibility than hard-and-fast plans. We know that the best plans never survive first contact with the enemy.”

“Eisenhower?”

“Field Marshal von Moltke. As shortened by Rommel ninety years later.” Fin swung them back toward their original course. It was nice to know the bookworm Finella was still in there—somewhere.

A quick peek at the camera view showed the others flying seamlessly in formation as if they truly were one bird.

“Personally,” she continued as if they were chatting over a shared banana split at Mountainside Cones, “I prefer the Sun Tzu quote: Plans are like a great river that maintains its course but adjusts its flow. Both formed and formless. We’re trained to continuously adapt to the situation.”

As if that wasn’t what he’d been doing for the entirety of the last two hours. Two hours? A mere hundred and twenty minutes ago, he hadn’t seen Fin Hyland in fourteen years. He’d never actually flown with the Night Stalkers. His helo would still be perched on the Peleliu’s upper deck. Except that was flexibility by need, not by training. Just how different were he and Fin now? Had their paths drifted irrevocably apart?

“Grab your shorts.”

Last time he’d heard her say that they’d been scooting buck naked out the back Daddy’s hay loft. They’d fallen asleep in each other's arms and been woken by the farm hands arriving to muck the stalls and milk the cattle. He’d almost left his underwear lying on top of the first bales they’d soon be tossing down to the cows. He could hear the smile in her voice.

At the memory? Or?—

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