Love in a Copper Light E-Book

M. L. Buchman

• Herausgeber: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

-a Night Stalkers CSAR romance story- The most dangerous mission of all...CSAR. Combat Search and Rescue. Pilot Penny “Copper” Penrose flies into every battle with a can-do attitude—even training missions. If only she could find that confidence off the battlefield. Medic Barry Goldsmith risks his life to help the wounded while under fire. He blew his chances with Penny once—a risk he won’t take again, seeking Love in a Copper Light.

Leseprobe

Love in a Copper Light

a Night Stalkers CSAR romance

M. L. Buchman

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

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Guardian of the Heart (excerpt)

About the Author

Also by M. L. Buchman

1

The Tonopah Test Range Airport tower gave them clearance and they were gone. Control towers didn’t want any return response; they just wanted you out of their airspace. So their helo lifted into the airspace of the Nevada Test and Training Range—the NTTR—and raced away from Tonopah without aword.

“This next part always freaks meout.”

“And you say that every time, Copper.” Vince Jawolski was flying low and fast, piloting their combat search-and-rescue helicopter toward their hold position for tonight’s training exercise.

It was true, she did always say it, but that didn’t make Penny “Copper” Penrose feel one bit less freaked. Not that she was worried about the battle—real or simulated—but rather that there was one in progress and their job was to wait. CSAR aircraft didn’t risk their precious medics until someone actually neededhelp.

In minutes they were circling five miles and ninety seconds outside the primary battlespace deep in the heart of the NTTR—five thousand square miles of blasted-to-hell desert. It was the perfect place to stretch their Black Hawk’s rotor blades a little bit. “Blue Helm” was a massive exercise to keep skills fresh and shake the bugs out of new tactics—without having someone shooting live rounds at them while they were doingit.

Five helos. That was their concern in tonight’s training scenario, out of the fifty aircraft and fifteen hundred ground troops spread across the Nevada desert.

The two transport birds had already delivered their 75th Rangers elements, to mess with a tank corps from the 10th Mountain, and slippedaway.

Two heavy gun platforms—one DAP Hawk and one Little Bird—were circling high above on overwatch.

And one kick-ass CSAR team all set to pull out any injured when the shit—simulated shit—did hit the fan. The six of them had been together for a while and she loved what they could do. But circling out of sight of the battle, there was nothing to see in this ass end of the NTTR except the occasional flight of F-35 jets off to test their mettle in some other section of the exercise. Meanwhile, she was getting tired of having the same night-vision view painted on the inside of her visor as they circled behind a low range of jagged ridges of brokenrock.

While she waited for the call, she wondered what David was up to tonight. Washe—

Shit!

She’d been rid of that disaster for two months—splattered across the windscreen like an entire fleet of pulped butterflies—and still her mind went there. Why did she naively keep hoping? Civilian men never understood military women. It was like strong women just didn’t compute in the civvie world; which sucked for her. Strong women didn’t really compute in the military world all that often either. She’d seen too many female soldiers who chose to play the slut role to get attention or the little sister role to avoid it. She wanted to play the herself role—and it wasn’t getting hercrap.

Penny sat in her copilot’s seat and tapped her way across the three status screens she was monitoring in a fast rotation. It wasn’t quite a nervous twitch—at least so she liked to assure herself—even if it would look that way to anyone able to see what was flashing across the inside of her helmet’s visor.

System status. Engine temperature: stable at 1,950 degrees Fahrenheit. Hydraulic and pressure systems online. Fuel: 87%. Twenty-seven different readings.

Flight status. Two-zero feet AGL—above ground level. Slow cruise: twenty knots. Running dark: infrared lights only. Heart of the NTTR. Nineteen different facts.

Battlespace. Still five miles and ninety seconds away. Two gunship helos at three and five thousand feet, and a drone at thirty thousand. The transport birds had returned to base—they had it easy now that they’d survived landing their teams. Easy unless things went badly and they had to extract the inserted Rangers under heavy fire. But the ground elements were holding strong and reporting no casualties.

The whole situation made for one messy tactical readout with every single identified fighter—good guy or bad—represented on a 3D map of the terrain by a symbology that had taken a months to learn but was now second nature.

System status. Twenty-seven readings…no changes.

Flight status…

Penny had never been able to help herself. She’d flown combat for too many of her years in the service. Every nerve in her body, and most definitely her adrenal glands, knew they were supposed to be in the heart of the battle. In the zone. Riding theedge.

Just because this battle was simulated didn’t change squat.

Since she’d gone CSAR, now she was off to the side, waiting while others fought. Her body was here, but her body’s chemistry was deep in the simulated action.

System status. All nominal.

Flight status…

By flicking through them fast enough, she could actually spot anything that changed in real time across all three spaces. All nominal. As if that wasn’t enough to make her crazy.

She’d done this so many times, she was able to do it automatically and still harass the team. She was a multi-tasking kind ofgirl.

And one task was not going to be thinking about a jerkwad civilian named David. Distraction. Definitely neededone.

“Calling me Copper, that’s another thing!” Penny groused over the intercom to her crewmates. She didn’t know why she even tried, it was one battle she was never going to win. With the name of Penelope Penrose and copper-red hair, the “Copper” nickname had been inevitable. “Why you’re just as bright as a copper penny!” was a pickup line that she usually answered with mere disdain, unless she’d been drinking, then it might be with her knee—she was tall enough to peg most men easily. Fighting battles is what shedid.

Too bad everybody on their flight had learned not to answer her now, even if they didn’t change their tune. Not her pilot, not the two crew chiefs perched at their miniguns, and not the two medics along for the ride until they got thecall.

“Lame-os!” She teased the lot ofthem.

It earned her a chuckle from starboard gunner Xavier Jones who sat at a minigun mounted close behind Vince’s pilotseat.

Unlike normal CSAR birds that went unarmed into battle, the Night Stalkers flew fully armed helos—without a Red Cross emblem—that just happened to carry a couple of medics. The Night Stalkers flew to places no one else could go, so they often had their own CSAR support.

“Long as you get me back in time for my wedding, I’ll call you anything you want…Copper!”

“You’re no help, Jones.” He’d hooked up with Noreen Wallace, one of the crew’s two medics. And like several other of their crews in the 5th Battalion E Company, command was letting them serve together—unique in the whole military as far as she knew. “How is it that no one ever tagged you with a nickname, Noreen?” Everyone else had one, though other than hers they weren’t used all that often.

“No one dares. I’m a freakin’ force of nature, that’s why. Or so Xavier keeps tellingme.”

“It’s true. Sure won’t catch this boy messing with that.” The six-four super-soldier Xavier would be the serious, hardcore pillar in any relationship that didn’t have Noreen on the other side of it. If Penny was black, shorter, and a medic, she’d want to grow up to be Noreen Wallace. As it was, she had three strikes against that dream.

System status.

Flight status.

Battlespace.

It felt as if she had nothing to do, even if that wasn’t true. Copilot on a CSAR Black Hawk helicopter was never a dull seat. One of the many things she loved about flying for the US Army’s 160th SOAR Night Stalkers.

“What would you like to be called?”

She blinked and lost track of her screens. Barry Goldsmith, Medic Two, never spoke to her directly. He was always pleasant and had a decent sense of humor, but something in her quashed every comment. No one had ever actually asked her that, so she didn’t have a quick answer.

“I’m guessing that ‘Red’ would be too cliché for you,” Barry continued over the intercom.

“I might have hospitalized the last dude who tried to call me that—back in tenth grade. He probably could have used yourhelp.”

“Okay ‘Red’ is out. I probably wouldn’t have been able to stabilize his condition for transport; remember I was in tenth grade at the sametime.”