Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) Read Online Free PDF Page B

something nasty was going on, that was for sure. And if they were ready to load… It was time to hustle and ignore the armament and fueling crews already swarming toward their birds.
    John reached back into the cabin for a wrench. One slapped into his hand. Connie had already assessed the situation and was on the move with a wrench of her own.
    He hated morning people. Even after a decade in the Army, he preferred to take a quiet half hour, maybe an hour. Get some coffee, and a plate of eggs and bacon, English muffin with strawberry jam, and a short stack if he was lucky, before he ever really considered being awake. Didn’t happen all that much, but that was his preference. Now, he’d slept three of the last thirty hours and had to prepare his bird for transport.
    He climbed up the toeholds leading to the top of the Black Hawk just as he had twenty-four hours earlier. At least here at Bagram Air Base, there was less chance of someone shooting you from the top of the nearest dune. The first order of business was folding back the rotors. Thankfully without having to saw off the blades this time.
    They rotated the fixed blade until it was aligned with the still-battered tail section. Next they broke free the second blade’s pins and swung it alongside its companion. As they tackled the next blade Connie actually spoke.
    “How’s the hand?”
    John flexed it and tried to ignore the twinge that ran up the length of his arm.
    He offered a noncommittal grunt.
    By the time the next blade swung into place she spoke again.
    “I don’t like being touched.”
    “I guessed.” Actually, he’d been worried. When she slept, the chill facade she usually wore—no, not chill. Aloof? Remote? Anyway, it had slipped off her like a shield set aside.
    He’d woken to find her asleep beside him. And he’d watched her face. No longer so carefully expressionless. No longer under the fierce control she always wielded. Her sleeping face reflected her sleeping thoughts. A gentleness that spoke of the woman more than the mind within. Then, after he’d studied her enough to know he’d not forget a single aspect of her face any time soon, not the high cheeks, not the ever so slightly flattened tip of her nose, not the surprising length of her lashes, unobservable under the impact of those sharp, assessing eyes when they were open.
    Then an abrupt shift: worry, strain—horror! He’d shaken her then to break her free from whatever so shrouded her features in terror.
    And nearly had his finger dislocated as a reward.
    Who knew what would have happened to him if he’d followed his first instinct and gathered her sleeping form into his arms.
    “I’m sorry. I was—”
    John left her the space of silence as they broke the double-pivot free and swung the forward blade back in line with the tail. It was perhaps the first time she’d voluntarily started a conversation, rather than responding to a direct question.
    “I’m sorry.” She moved away to fold down the tail rotor.
    John reinserted the pin bolts before climbing down.
    Down onto a pallet.
    A pallet of parachutes. Big ones.
    Shit.
    He hated parachutes.

Chapter 8
    The C-17 with two DAP Hawks in its belly flew straight through. No Aviano Air Base in Italy. No Ramstein in Germany. Fourteen hours, two flight crew changes, and several midair refuelings, straight to the States.
    They slept as well as they could on the hard deck. Everyone woke cranky after fighting to ignore the pounding roar of the four jet engines ramming them from Southwest Asia over the Mediterranean and finally the Atlantic. Water bottles and plastic-packaged sandwiches were handed round, all made with white bread that turned to mush and stuck to the roof of your mouth in awkward lumps.
    John now had a crick in his neck that he couldn’t crack loose to go along with his sore hand. He and Connie put in a couple of listless hours on the Hawk. They finished what could be done inside the cavernous space hurtling along at