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

out. And there was no woman he’d ever respected more highly.
    Connie snapped the rubber band around the box of cards.
    Here was another woman he couldn’t help but watch.

Chapter 9
    “Practice.” Connie sucked hard to get her breath in the freezing air now roaring through the Globemaster’s cargo bay.
    “Practice makes perfect.” She whispered it like a mantra. It was how her father had raised her and the Army had trained her. And she agreed. But right now she was cold and tired.
    “Excellent conditions for an advanced training opportunity.” She could practically hear her past instructors barking that out.
    After a mission, thirteen hours repairing their DAP, and fourteen hours in flight, they were just twenty miles short of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the home of the 160th SOAR. Whatever was so urgent as to drag them across half the world didn’t supplant a training opportunity. Not in Fort Campbell’s mind.
    Even with her helmet on, she could barely hear herself think. They were down from thirty-five thousand feet to seven hundred. The crews sat on the side benches, their knees pulled in tight, facing the two Black Hawks awash in the red light that let their eyes adapt for the dark. The helicopters loomed huge inside the Globemaster’s bay.
    The sound redoubled as the jet’s crew opened the tail door. One section folded up into the ceiling, revealing the black of a winter’s night in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. No moon, no clouds to reflect back any man-made light. The other section of the rear door folded down until it angled down slightly below horizontal. Where the rear of the cargo bay had been now gaped a great maw of darkness waiting to swallow them whole.
    “Drop zone in ten,” the pilot announced over the intercom.
    “Parachutes suck!” John leaned in and yelled near the leading edge of Connie’s helmet so that she could just hear him.
    A crew member in a harness strolled to the rear of the aircraft and chucked a small package out into the wind stream. The wind caught it, and in moments a little four-foot drogue chute danced beyond the tail at the end of a long line.
    “Five.”
    “They’re frickin’ awesome! I love free fall!” she shouted back.
    The crewman moseyed back to mid-ship.
    “Drop! Drop! Drop!” sounded over the intercom.
    The C-17 loadmaster popped the release, and the main chute was pulled out by the drogue. One second, the parachute filled to a huge size just past the end of the ramp, larger than the cargo door it had just exited.
    The next second, the Vengeance Black Hawk MH-60M DAP shot by Connie’s knees with a foot to spare. By the time it reached the door, the ten-thousand-pound bird was moving at the speed of an express train. Actually, the parachute was slowing it down to earthbound speeds while the C-17 continued to roar ahead.
    Another long webbing leash tied to Henderson’s Hawk shot out the cargo door. It in turn dragged free the second bird’s big parachute, and in moments the second chute and Viper were gone, moving even faster. It left Connie breathless in the sudden vacuum of the abruptly empty cavernous interior of the plane.
    “Go! Go! Go!”
    Magically the crewman materialized in the center of the cargo hatch. Both Black Hawk crews were scrambling to their feet from opposite sides of the cargo bay.
    “Free fall makes me barf!” John shouted at her as they threw off their safety belts and jumped to their feet. Or rather struggled upright. Large survival kits dangled from the fronts of their vests to hang awkwardly between their legs.
    They waddled past the jumpmaster as fast as they could. He checked the security of their riplines on the overhead rail before letting them waddle off the plane.
    At the tail edge of the ramp, she turned to face John.
    Connie yelled out, “Wimp!” and allowed herself to tumble over backward into the night sky.
    She started the timer on her watch as she completed the first somersault. A heat blast and the