Since the First Day by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman [Buchman, M. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

6

Present Day, June 13, 2350 Hours (Panama Local Time)

Carmen did a full inspection and systems check as Danny continued to fight them through the storm. A couple of the Deltas were awake. It was a strange team. Three women, four men. She’d never seen a female Delta before and here was a whole clump of them. A gaggle of geese. A flock of ewes. An incoming disaster of Deltas? What would it be like to be a woman who kicked butt at a Delta level? She’d miss her Chinook too much, but the three women looked beyond cool.

One of the guy Deltas called her over.

“Oh. My. God!” Carmen slapped a hand to her chest and put her wrist to her forehead. “I’m gonna faint. It only took four hours for one of the silent warriors to acknowledge that they weren’t the only people on this flight.” Then she collapsed onto one of the Zodiac’s pontoons and fell upside down into the bottom of the boat to sprawl at his feet.

Several of the Deltas startled awake, inspected her strangely for a moment, then went back to sleep.

“Got a question for you, once you’re done playing the lead role from a Bizet opera.”

“What are you talking about?” She continued laying upside down, but raised her head to inspect him. He was handsome, but she was feeling oddly self-conscious about teasing him, which wasn’t like her. She teased everybody—except Danny since that night he’d shot the kid.

“The opera Carmen. The dazzling man killer.”

“There’s an opera named after me?” As if she didn’t have Carmen the gypsy dancer emblazoned on the side of her helmet. “How cool is that? Dazzling man killer—perfect fit. Are you my next victim? This should be fun.”

The guy looked at his watch, typical Delta.

She flipped around until she was upright once again.

“How would you take down a cruise ship?”

Delta operators had no sense of humor.

“Couple-a Hellfire missiles at the waterline?”

The discussion went on for a few minutes, but her thoughts were on why Danny was acting so strangely. She left the Deltas sitting in their rubber boat in the cargo bay talking about it and drifted back forward.

She ended up close behind the two pilots’ seats. She didn’t usually ride in the observer’s chair, but the memory of the two storms—the present one and the one in which she’d met Danny—had drawn her back to the front.

Her last two years aboard the Calamity Jane II stood out so much more clearly than the five prior years in the regular Army or the two years of additional training to become a Night Stalker.

No, that wasn’t all of it. Each moment with Danny stood out. The good and the bad. The smooth perfection of how he’d flown them out of that battle, despite a windshield so star-cracked that he could only fly by peaking out of the bullet holes marking where unfriendly fire had wounded the captain and killed the last person in that seat, despite the shot-up hydraulics that had forced him to wrestle the massive helo by brute force, all while having just shot a kid.

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