Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) by M. L. Buchman Read Free Book Online

burned-fuel smell of jet exhaust surrounded her for half a moment before she fell into clear air.
    Connie normally loved free fall. HALO jumps were her favorite training exercise. High altitude, low opening, you felt as if nothing could hold you back. With the right gear, you could plunge seven miles from jetliner altitudes over thirty-five thousand feet to under a thousand feet in less than two minutes. Two hundred miles per hour without a vehicle or any more protection than a helmet and a high-altitude suit.
    But not tonight, so Big John would be okay. Tonight was a LALO jump: low altitude, low opening. The line jerked her drogue parachute free just after she left the aircraft. It yanked out her main chute, and the harness grabbed her hard, jerked her painfully to an abrupt halt. From a hundred-plus knots to twenty in two seconds flat.
    She checked the sky about her.
    Seven other chutes, John close beside her. Good, the whole team accounted for.
    The C-17 disappeared from all visibility even as she watched, the closing rear hatch cutting out the red interior lights. Gone. The jet had flown without lights for such a training run. At the limit of vision, the nav lights blinked on and then they were gone.
    Below, the two massive chutes lowering the Black Hawks toward the open field of the drop zone were etched against the white landscape. Snow. It was going to be cold down on the ground reassembling the Hawks for flight. She steered for them. The freezing night air was chapping what little of her face wasn’t protected by the helmet.
    At a hundred feet, she dropped the survival bag on a long lead line. Fifty feet. Thirty. The bag hit the ground like an anchor. She stalled the chute and landed soft. A quick pull on the forward shroud lines and the chute spilled air, collapsing to the ground.
    She jerked the quick-release toggle and started gathering her chute as Big John dropped in fifty feet to her left. The others ranged beyond him in a tight grouping. John set to work on bundling his chute.
    “No barfing. Not even a gag. I’m disappointed.”
    All he did was snarl in reply, “Sixty minutes.”
    She checked her wrist, fifty-six and counting from when they’d stepped off the tailgate. The exercise hadn’t specified which time to start, so she’d count from the “Go!” not the ground.
    She saw John’s nod. The burden was now on them. On that they could agree.
    First, they had to check the chopper. Then put her back together. After that, perform the preflight check so that the Major could fly them back to Fort Campbell. Undetected.
    And, more importantly, they had to beat Viper .
    Fifty-five minutes.
    ***
    “Goddamn it!” Sergeant Steve Johnson looked out Fort Campbell’s heli-field control-tower window.
    “Hey, Jeff. How many Hawks were on the concrete when we came on shift?”
    “I don’t know. A dozen, give or take.”
    “How many were DAP Hawks?”
    “Two. Why?”
    “Well, now there are three.” He had the satisfaction of hearing Jeff’s curse. Jeff moved beside him and looked down at the floodlit field.
    “How in the hell did they do that? And when?”
    Steve ran the security recordings back. “Four minutes ago.” Low and slow. They’d actually come sliding from inside a hangar he knew to be empty. He rolled back on camera four. There they were, dropping two crew chiefs to the ground. The smaller one did something quick at the edge of the hangar doors. He’d better let maintenance know they’d need to fix the alarm on the hangar’s back door.
    The pilot flew straight through, low enough that he’d barely hesitated at the threshold to retrieve the ground team.
    “Slick.” He’d seen Navy SEALs who were clumsier.
    He rolled the recorder further back. Camera fourteen at the back gate.
    Again the two crew chiefs slid out of the night with the grace of combat operators and captured the guard booth and its three inhabitants. They’d actually opened the gate so that the Hawk could fly through with