Read Online By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers) by M. L. Buchman - Free Book Online
Authors: M. L. Buchman
Ads: Link
to be the company’s first AMC, it was time for Kara to step it up if she was going to hang on to being the second one in the company’s short history.
The GCS coffin itself was crowded up against the forward bulkhead of the hangar deck. Heavy cables snaked out of the side, one into the ship’s power, the other into the communications array to emerge at the six-meter dish she’d rigged high aloft for communicating with her RPAs. It auto-tracked the Gray Eagle when it was in line of sight and switched over to the Peleliu ’s satellite feed when the RPA went out of range, like during her dive last night.
At the door of the GCS coffin, Kara halted and looked back at Colonel Gibson. “You’re sure about this dude?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Kara already knew that there would be few higher stamps of approval than Michael’s; she just wanted another shot at Major Willard Wilson. She resisted tagging him aloud as Limp Willy, but it was a close thing.
She keyed the code and then leaned in for the retinal scan. The heavy bolts thunked open and she led the way in, turning on the internal lights.
* * *
Justin was last in and stumbled to a halt. He’d seen the outside every day for two months. It looked like a white-painted cargo container, barely worthy of note if not for the heavy locks. But he’d never been in the GCS before, and it was like seeing a whole new side to Kara Moretti.
How much did he know about this woman?
“Not much” was the answer staring him in the face.
One wall was dominated by a pair of long white boxes that he recognized as Gray Eagle coffins. He’d been responsible several times for transporting one of them to an appropriate airstrip, because the MQ-1C Gray Eagle needed a couple thousand feet of runway, more than twice the length of the Peleliu . So, when the 5D and the ship were on the move, the ground team would box up the Gray Eagle RPA. Then he’d fetch it, and them, for the move. Afterward, he’d deliver them to some handy Air Force base for launch and recovery.
How odd to fly an aircraft that you almost never saw. It’s what those guys at NASA must feel like. He remembered a trip he and his siblings had made to Florida when they were all kids. His parents had taken the three of them to Kennedy Space Center for a shuttle launch. Rafe only ever cared about the horses, but Bessie Anne had wanted to be an astronaut. Sister who was an astronaut had sounded pretty cool to a nine-year-old. She’d gone U.S. Air Force, but hadn’t made it into the program before the shuttles went away.
But he’d remembered that launch and the tour Ma had arranged of the command-and-control center. Granted there had been like sixty gals and guys there, but you could just feel that everything had a purpose and it all had a single focus—launching a rocket into space.
Kara’s coffin was like that; it was immersion in an absolutely focused space.
On the first stretch of the wall opposite the Gray Eagle’s containers were a long workbench and three much smaller coffins. They were barely two meters long each and as big across as his forearm. These would be the ScanEagle RPAs. They could be launched off a patrol boat or any ship with a little open space. He’d seen Kara use the little craft a couple times for simpler sorties or as a communications relay when the Gray Eagle was over the horizon and there wasn’t a satellite channel handy. Even now, one was out on the bench, clearly taken apart for service.
It was the back end of the container that really drove home how different Moretti was. The Gray Eagle’s ground control station was a full pilot-and-copilot rig, but Kara’s only view of the world was through screens.
And for such a seemingly simple craft, there were a whole lot of screens. Big ones where he had windows on the Jane , secondaries that must include sensor data when active. Then a full set of flight instrumentation and controls.
On top of that was a bank of radios even more
The GCS coffin itself was crowded up against the forward bulkhead of the hangar deck. Heavy cables snaked out of the side, one into the ship’s power, the other into the communications array to emerge at the six-meter dish she’d rigged high aloft for communicating with her RPAs. It auto-tracked the Gray Eagle when it was in line of sight and switched over to the Peleliu ’s satellite feed when the RPA went out of range, like during her dive last night.
At the door of the GCS coffin, Kara halted and looked back at Colonel Gibson. “You’re sure about this dude?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Kara already knew that there would be few higher stamps of approval than Michael’s; she just wanted another shot at Major Willard Wilson. She resisted tagging him aloud as Limp Willy, but it was a close thing.
She keyed the code and then leaned in for the retinal scan. The heavy bolts thunked open and she led the way in, turning on the internal lights.
* * *
Justin was last in and stumbled to a halt. He’d seen the outside every day for two months. It looked like a white-painted cargo container, barely worthy of note if not for the heavy locks. But he’d never been in the GCS before, and it was like seeing a whole new side to Kara Moretti.
How much did he know about this woman?
“Not much” was the answer staring him in the face.
One wall was dominated by a pair of long white boxes that he recognized as Gray Eagle coffins. He’d been responsible several times for transporting one of them to an appropriate airstrip, because the MQ-1C Gray Eagle needed a couple thousand feet of runway, more than twice the length of the Peleliu . So, when the 5D and the ship were on the move, the ground team would box up the Gray Eagle RPA. Then he’d fetch it, and them, for the move. Afterward, he’d deliver them to some handy Air Force base for launch and recovery.
How odd to fly an aircraft that you almost never saw. It’s what those guys at NASA must feel like. He remembered a trip he and his siblings had made to Florida when they were all kids. His parents had taken the three of them to Kennedy Space Center for a shuttle launch. Rafe only ever cared about the horses, but Bessie Anne had wanted to be an astronaut. Sister who was an astronaut had sounded pretty cool to a nine-year-old. She’d gone U.S. Air Force, but hadn’t made it into the program before the shuttles went away.
But he’d remembered that launch and the tour Ma had arranged of the command-and-control center. Granted there had been like sixty gals and guys there, but you could just feel that everything had a purpose and it all had a single focus—launching a rocket into space.
Kara’s coffin was like that; it was immersion in an absolutely focused space.
On the first stretch of the wall opposite the Gray Eagle’s containers were a long workbench and three much smaller coffins. They were barely two meters long each and as big across as his forearm. These would be the ScanEagle RPAs. They could be launched off a patrol boat or any ship with a little open space. He’d seen Kara use the little craft a couple times for simpler sorties or as a communications relay when the Gray Eagle was over the horizon and there wasn’t a satellite channel handy. Even now, one was out on the bench, clearly taken apart for service.
It was the back end of the container that really drove home how different Moretti was. The Gray Eagle’s ground control station was a full pilot-and-copilot rig, but Kara’s only view of the world was through screens.
And for such a seemingly simple craft, there were a whole lot of screens. Big ones where he had windows on the Jane , secondaries that must include sensor data when active. Then a full set of flight instrumentation and controls.
On top of that was a bank of radios even more
Similar Books
