Free By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers) by M. L. Buchman

want to kick her; it would be far too obvious. His hand had come to rest naturally on the joystick controller built into the chair arm. A tap showed that it was linked to the one on Kara’s chair. He wiggled it hard enough to get her attention.
    She glanced over at him, huffed out a sigh, and then nodded ever so slightly, keeping her mouth shut as Wilson continued, apparently unaware of the barely averted broadside.
    “…have assets on the ground in the Negev Desert. We have lost communications with them. You are the closest asset available with the resources to locate and extract them.”
    “The Negev?”
    Major Wilson nodded.
    “The Activity,” Justin said slowly and carefully, “has lost track of ground reconnaissance personnel in the Israeli desert.” He didn’t know why he had to repeat it to make it real. Because it was too unreal?
    Kara rolled her eyes at him. “If The Activity is spying on Israel, it means that we’re checking out whether to do some shit against our main ally in the region. They gotta be into something seriously bad.”
    Justin reached the same conclusion, but it just didn’t strike him as…mannerly. No matter how many Taliban, al-Qaeda, and IS bullies he’d helped take down, he could never get over what they did to each other and the populace around them. He’d helped rescue a dozen hostages out of the Somali desert, some of whom had been there for years. Years of their lives lost to some fanatics who Delta Force had made sure were no longer walking on God’s green earth.
    “So we’re going to unleash Delta against our allies now. Between you, me, and the steel walls, what in the world did they do to deserve that?”
    “That,” Wilson said solemnly, “is what we’ll find out after you get our assets’ butts back out of there.”

Chapter 7
    “Three nights.” Kara rubbed at her temples and slumped lower in her armchair pilot’s seat. “Three straight nights we’ve been running at the desert without a peep.”
    Her Gray Eagle had swept ever-increasing circles over the vast wilderness of the Negev. Overlaps, grids, high-altitude flights hunting for any sign of a U.S. military signal.
    The first night she’d only monitored on the radio frequency that Wilson had provided her.
    Justin had tried to help, but he only knew choppers. Might as well have sat her down in the cockpit of Calamity Jane and said, “Go!” Even if he’d been a jet jockey, it wouldn’t have helped much. The RPA was too different an animal.
    When she’d looked to Wilson, he simply shook his head.
    Michael had raised his hands as if fending her off. “I use your data. I’m no pilot.”
    She hadn’t asked. The next night, when they all gathered for the next flight, she’d had Sergeant Santiago Marquez flying beside her. Wilson hadn’t said a word.
    Okay, a bit less of a jerk than she’d first thought. A bit.
    She kept Justin close, giving him the traffic control sensors to watch. She didn’t want any nasty surprise of an Israeli Defense Force F-16 or AH-64 Apache weapons helicopter crawling up her behind unexpectedly.
    With the extra help, she expanded to a full spectrum of military radio frequencies on the second night.
    On night three, she’d opened to the civilian frequencies with no better luck.
    Kara looked at Wilson. “You think these guys are still alive.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you think this because…”
    “Because they wouldn’t go down without a squawk of some sort to let us know.”
    “Even if—”
    “Even if they were under live fire,” Wilson insisted. “They’re hunkered down hard. They should be squirting a signal of some sort on the hour, every hour of darkness.”
    “But they’re not.”
    He dropped back onto his stool. “No, they’re not.”
    Kara’s scream of frustration was loud enough to hurt even her own ears inside the GCS coffin.
    * * *
    Justin winced; too late to cover his ears. There had to be some way to help Kara find these guys. He’d felt clumsy at the