Wind River Protector

Book 8: Wind River Valley

by Lindsay McKenna

Genres: Romantic Suspense; Western Romance

Synopsis

A novel from the best-selling author of Home to Wind River.

Real love is worth every risk....

Ex-Air Force pilot Andy Whitcomb loves nothing more than the wide blue skies, but when a helicopter crash fighting forest fires in California leaves her injured and shaken, she's ready to return home to the peace of Wind River Ranch. The good news is, there's a chance for her to fly helos for the county sheriff's department. The bad news? The person in charge is none other than Dev Mitchell, an ex-Army Black Hawk pilot — and the rugged, sharp-eyed man Andy has never forgotten after five days together running from the Taliban after a nerve-wracking near-miss in Afghanistan.

Dev can't believe his eyes when Andy walks into the interview. She's as strong and sexy as he remembers, and every bit qualified for the job, which she clearly wants. Unfortunately, if he's going to be her boss, their relationship has to remain strictly professional — a regret Dev fights to keep hidden as they begin to work together. But when a chance encounter with violent drug traffickers forces them into survival mode, both of them will fight to hold on to the connection they can't ignore — and the chance of a future together.

Release date: July 30, 2019

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 310

Sample

August 15

“Well, hell!”

Captain Andrea Whitcomb hissed out the epithet. She was in trouble. Her harness bit deeply into her shoulders as she hauled back on the stick of her A-10 Warthog, having swooped within fifty feet of a hill peppered with Taliban guns firing back at her. The Gatling gun beneath the nose of the aircraft made her entire body shake from the fire power she’d just delivered against the enemy.

It was dusk, the lurid red color of the sunset dying behind the Afghanistan mountains to the west. Her A-10 had a helluva lot of armor, especially around the seat of the cockpit where she sat, but bullets had done damage to both engines on her stalwart close air support jet. Her gloves were sweaty with adrenaline as she felt the gravity pinning her back against the seat. She silently pleaded with the ailing combat jet to climb and get the hell out of bullet range of her attackers.

Jerking a glance to her left, looking through NVGs, night vision goggles, she saw the Black Hawk helicopter was trying to make an escape out of that deadly valley. It had just dropped a SEAL team near the wall of the canyon when it came under fire. She had been called in from another mission to protect the Army helo. It was always dangerous dropping or picking up black ops, and it was done after dark, if possible.

This time? She was in trouble. And so was the Black Hawk. The Taliban weren’t stupid. They had the helo caught in a bracket, heavy fire aimed at its rotor assembly area. Their enemy knew if they could destroy that one mechanical mechanism, the helo was grounded and everyone on it would eventually be killed—by them.

Sucking in a breath of oxygen through her mask, eyes narrowed, Andy saw the warning black smoke issuing from the helo’s two turbo engines. Not good. Not good at all. There was a mountain range to the north end of this box-canyon-type valley and the helo was hobbling along, clawing for air and trying to get away from the bullets of the Taliban, too.

Her gaze snapped to the engine indicator, the dials telling her she was in equally bad shape as that limping-along Army helo. From muscle memory, she went into ejection-seat mode. First, mayday calls to Bagram. Her combat jet would have to be destroyed, provided she could safely eject out of the crippled craft. Nothing could be left of it to be picked through and then sold to China or Russia, who would want avionics, for starters, from the jet. There were so many top-secret black boxes on this jet, they had to be destroyed, instead of hoping a fire or explosion would do the job. She set the detonation assembly.

Her gloved hand flew over the cockpit array, prepping the jet for the series of internalized explosions that would be initiated upon crashing to the ground. Hopefully, with her ejected, the parachute opening and being far enough away from where the A-10 augured in, she’d survive this. A landing area was critical. She had a GPS radio on her flight suit and that would continually broadcast her whereabouts. That way, she could be picked up by either the Air Force or some other rescue operator helo that might be nearby. Sweat stood out on her upper lip, her mind moving at the speed of a computer.

The Warthog’s engines, that specific whistling sound that was protected by the helmet she wore, couldn’t be heard. But she could feel it lag and then a burst of surging power, and then her indicators would drop once more. She was losing power and altitude little by little. Barely at six thousand feet, heading north into those mountains, she could no longer see the Black Hawk because it was below her somewhere, barely creeping along at about fifteen hundred feet or so. Was it carrying a three- or four-man crew on board? Andy didn’t know. She completed her eject list and searched the rugged mountains looming up ahead of her. The ravines were covered with hardscrabble trees that clung to their rocky surface. The tallest peaks were at ten thousand feet. For the next minute, she homed in on where she wanted to eject, what the terrain looked like and if she could survive it once she jettisoned out of the cockpit.

The first engine flamed out. The craft listed for a moment before she used the rudders beneath her flight boots, and the stick, to keep the Warthog flying level, flying toward her objective in the darkening sky. One down. An A-10 could handle losing an engine and make it back to base provided it wasn’t shot up and coughing, like the second one was doing right now.

For a moment, the faces of her adopted mother and father, Steve and Maud, flashed before her eyes. She had been put on the step of a fire station and a firefighter had found her one cool May morning. She had been abandoned. Andy never found out who her mother was, but as luck would have it, she had been adopted months later and greatly loved by her new parents, who lived in Wind River, Wyoming.

She didn’t want to die! Not like this. Andy had spent years in the Air Force, and every rotation back into Afghanistan provided close air support to men and women on the ground. She loved her life, her mission. But now things were coming to an end. And she wasn’t sure if she’d survive.

For a moment, her attention was torn to eleven o’clock, to the left of where she flew. There was a small explosion, and she knew it had to be the Black Hawk hitting the rocky mountainside below and to the port side of her jet. It was the same area where she was going to eject into. Praying that the crew and two pilots made it out safely, her gaze flickered between the engine dial and where the small fire was below her. Then she focused on her own plight.

And then there was a huge explosion, a rolling red, yellow and orange fireball bursting out into the ebony darkness, lighting up a huge area around the helo. No one could survive that second explosion. Her heart ached for the crew.

The second engine sputtered and died. It flamed out, and she shut off the fuel line to it.

Automatically, her muscles puckered. Grabbing the lever, the cockpit Plexiglas separated with a loud bang around her.

Wind slammed and pummeled her masked and helmeted face. She was glad she had the NVGs in place over her eyes. Gritting her teeth, she initiated the ejection. In seconds, there was an explosion beneath her seat. Andy bit back a cry as her tightened nylon harness bit hard into her shoulders. Thrust into the cold darkness, the seat blew away from the now plumeting A-10.

Enclosed in darkness, Andy kept her elbows tightly pinned against her body. She kept her hands and arms stiff, holding them in place as the seat continued skyward. Just as the seat separated from her, she tumbled, hearing her chute begin to open somewhere above her.

Would it open completely? Her mind rattled between dying and wanting desperately to live. She was twenty-six years old, her whole life before her. If she made it out of this crash? She would leave the Air Force and find something in aviation. She loved to fly; she did not want to give it up, but she had to find something safer. The future wasn’t an issue; surviving this situation was.

She swung like a pendulum through the night, wind gusts pummeling her. She could see she was going to land somewhere along the edge of a ravine. There were scrub trees everywhere. There was no way she was going to avoid tangling with one of them.

Just then, the A-10 plunged down onto the mountainside to the right of her. It was a thousand feet higher in elevation from where she was presently drifting downward. Automatically, she opened her mouth to balance the pressure inside and outside her lungs. The pressure waves from the crash were like fists slamming into her. Yellow and orange fire erupted into several fireballs, telling her the string of explosions were the ones designed to destroy all the avionics. The whole area lit up in a surreal, shadowy reddish glow for a few seconds. It blinded her; she’d stupidly looked at the explosion and it blew her vision in the NVGs. She swung several more times in the sky, several smaller explosions occurring at the crash site.

The ground came up fast. Getting some of her night vision back, she saw the trees looming beneath her dangling boots. She kept her knees soft and slightly bent. In seconds, she slammed into a tree, branches and limbs snapping and breaking off beneath her. Leaves, twigs blew up around her. Andy’s legs were pummeled as her ascent slowed dramatically, her body crashing through the tree, bruises blooming all over her legs and arms.

She hit the ground, rocks biting into her one-piece flight uniform, letting out an “oooffff . . .” The straps of the chute gave her a soft landing. And then they untangled from the branches and the chute collapsed nearby.

Heart pounding, fear tunneling through her, Andy had no idea if there were Taliban nearby. They did not have night vision equipment and were known to camp at dark. Was she safe? Not safe? Was there a group in this ravine? She didn’t know.

Disoriented from the landing, she pulled off her helmet, setting it nearby. She unstrapped her pistol, keeping it easy to reach after sliding a round into the chamber, the safety off. Now, after all those yearly training sessions for just such a situation, Andy knew what to do. She made sure her GPS radio was on and broadcasting an invisible location beacon signal to anyone who might be hunting to pick her up.

The explosion she’d seen earlier showed she was about half a mile farther up on the ravine than the spot where the Black Hawk had crashed. Had anyone survived? She looked around, trying not to sob for air, adrenaline making her gasp. With trembling hands, she unsnapped the chute from her harness, dropping it to the ground.

Through her NVGs she couldn’t see far because of the thickets in the ravine itself.

First things first. She started to get up as two more minor but powerful explosions went off above her. Andy stood on shaky knees as she scrambled up the hill, slipping, falling on the field of rocks. Luckily, her Nomex gloves were on, protecting her hands from being sliced and cut, but her knees didn’t fare as well. Getting to the chute, she gathered it up between her arms. Taking it down to the tree she’d crashed through, she pushed it toward the trunk, getting down on her hands and knees, digging a hole to hide it from prying enemy eyes.

She wasn’t going to need the helmet either, so she dug another hole with effort, her knuckles bruised from all the smaller rocks she hit. It was nearly impossible to dig deep enough because there was more rock than soil. Andy wondered how these trees survived on this windswept ridge. Lucky it was August and not the snow season. She wondered how anything survived in this godforsaken place known as the Sandbox.

Pulling up the cuff of her flight-suit sleeve, she saw it was 2100, nine p.m. Standing, she looked around. Above and below her, there were two fires: the Black Hawk burning below, and above, her beloved A-10.

She looked up into the cloudless sky, the stars so close she thought she could reach out and touch them. It was a moonless night. Keying her hearing, she took off the rubber band and repositioned her shoulder-length chestnut hair into a ponytail. Where was the enemy? She didn’t know. Never had she felt so naked and vulnerable as now. And scared. It was as real as it would ever get for Andy. The adrenaline was still pounding through her veins, and her hands were shaky as she touched the butt of her pistol, which lay across her chest on top of the Kevlar vest she wore.

The wind was powerful and came blasting through the area in unexpected gusts, sometimes pushing her a step sideways or backward. She was glad her flight suit was a desert-tan color so it wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb night or day. Not that the Taliban traveled at night. They rarely did.

For the first time since joining the Air Force, Andy wished she wasn’t in the military. She knew the dangers of A-10 jet jockeys being hit by enemy fire. It had happened to her many times before, usually bullets down the fuselage. Tonight? The enemy had gotten lucky and she was the unlucky one. Would an Air Force helo pick her up? How soon? She knew she had to try to call in and pulled the radio from her pocket.

Her night vision goggles had been affixed to her helmet, but she’d taken them off and hung them around her neck. She didn’t want to bother with them at the moment. Time was of the essence. However, without moonlight she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. It was that black. Fingers trembling, she brought the radio up to her eyes, barely seeing the outline of it. Frowning, she couldn’t find the green light on it that indicated it was working.

No...

Taking off her flight glove, she stuffed it in a leg pocket. Running her fingers across the top of the device, she cut her fingertip. Her heart sank in earnest. The top part of her radio was broken. That was why there was no green light. She must have struck it with the limbs of the tree as she parachuted to safety.

Looking around, fear snaking through her, Andy knew without her GPS radio working to signal where she was located, there would be no help coming except from the A-10 seconds before it augured in. Lifting her chin, she saw the flames of her crashed jet rapidly dwindling, more like a candle in the ebony night instead of the bonfire before. Her only hope was to remain near the wreckage. Someone, somewhere, would have to have fixed the last location of the GPS. They would send a helicopter crew out to the area and rescue her. She had to remain here. If it was cluttered with Taliban nearby? Her rescuers would not pick her up.

A shiver went through her. It was ass-freezing-cold on top of the ravine. She wrapped her arms around herself after pulling on the glove once again. It was bitterly cold. And until daylight came, Andy had no idea how far away her jet was, or how to get close to it to be seen by a rescue crew. And Taliban could be anywhere. If the jet was out on a bare spot on the slope, she would be seen by some sharp-eyed enemy for sure.

Heart sinking, she remained near the tree, unsure what to do. Her radio wasn’t working, so no one would be able to find her. All she had on her flight vest were a few protein bars in her thigh pockets. And no water. This didn’t look good.

“Hey!”

Whirling around, Andy stumbled and nearly fell. Her heart banged in her chest, her throat closed as the deep male voice came out of the night.

“I’m friendly, don’t shoot!”

Her hand was already around the grip of the pistol as she righted herself, eyes huge as a dark shape—at least six feet tall—emerged from the inkiness of the ravine. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“Lieutenant Dev Mitchell. Are you the pilot from that A-10?”

Gulping, relieved, her eyes narrowed as the man came toward her. She could barely see the outline of his flight suit. “Y-yes. You’re from the Black Hawk that crashed earlier?”

He halted. “I am. The only survivor. Who are you?”

“Captain Andrea Whitcomb, US Air Force. I was flying that A-10 until I got hit in both engines.”

He gripped her arm. “Are you injured? Can you walk?”

She felt the strength of his fingers around her upper arm. Under ordinary circumstances, she’d have jerked away. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances at all. “I’m okay . . . just bruises. Shook up for sure.”

“Did you hide your chute?”

“Under this tree here. My GPS radio is damaged. No one can find where I’m at.”

“I found you.”

She saw his teeth white against the deep shadows of his craggy features. “How?”

He pointed to a set of NVG goggles around his neck. “These. Where’s your helmet? Are the NVGs good on them?”

“Yes,” she said. “I took them off my helmet before burying it. They are here, around my neck.”

He released her. “We gotta get the hell outta here. The Taliban will come in at dawn, looking for us, searching for black boxes on both aircraft. We can’t hang around here.”

“B-but,” she stammered, fear rising in her, “don’t you have a GPS radio?”

“I do and it works, but we can’t stay around these wrecks. Even a SAR, Search-and-Rescue, crew can’t land in the middle of the Taliban closing in on where those birds are located. We have to leave. I’m in touch with them. SAR will track and follow my GPS coordinates until it’s safe to come in and pick us up. This is very heavy enemy territory. We gotta leave. Now.”

She turned, then moved to beneath the boughs of the tree, trying to stay out of the wind. So much of her fear had abated because the other pilot was there. And he sounded like he knew what he was talking about. “You seem to know what to do.”

Again, that cocky grin. “Yeah. Not my first rodeo, Captain. You good enough to travel? The farther away we get from here at night, the better off we’ll be. It’s August; the sun’s gonna come up early. We need to find a cave or someplace to hide when dawn comes. Right now we’re in Taliban central. We need to head west,” and he pointed across the ravine. “There’s a firebase about forty miles as the crow flies in that direction. We have to climb up and over the mountain range to reach it.”

“Forty miles?” she managed, her voice raspy. “We’re walking to it?”

“Yeah. It’s that or stay here and get hunted down by Taliban, who will sure as hell behead us, and we’ll show up on videos across the internet. I don’t think you want that.”

“Hell no!” She heard him give a low chuckle.

“You saved our ass after we unloaded that SEAL group. They got away and blended into the wall of the canyon and made their escape. Thanks.”

“What about your other crew?”

She heard his voice lower, a lot of hidden emotion behind it. “Dead. We crashed. I was the only one who got out.”

“Oh, God . . . I’m sorry, so sorry.”

“Ready?” he rasped. “We’re going to go down into this ravine and climb up the other side. We have about five hours of night to hide us, and then we’ll have targets on our backs.”

“Roger that.” Andy settled the NVGs into place over her eyes. The wind shifted, and she could smell his flight suit, the strong odor of smoke and grease contained in it. “Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”

“Some first degree burns on the back of my neck and top of my ears is all. I’m okay. I have some water bottles in my leg pockets. Are you thirsty?” He pulled on his NVGs and then gripped her gloved hand with his.

“No, but I’m sure I will be. I have no water on me.”

He grunted. “You’ll have it whenever you want. Come on.”

Andy could barely see Mitchell’s face. It was his soft voice, with almost, she swore, an Irish lilt to it, that helped her steady her own fear. She wished she could see his face. Was he married? Have a wife and kids at home? Most likely. What must they be feeling right now? She knew without a doubt that her own parents would be receiving a call from the Pentagon that she was MIA, missing in action. Andy’s heart filled with anguish; she knew it would tear them up, and her three adopted siblings.

His hand was strong and guiding without hurting her fingers. He led her down the steep, rocky slope, and they were quickly devoured from anyone’s sight beneath the scrub trees that stubbornly lived in the unstable ravine. There was no time to talk and no time to look around. She could see his broad set of shoulders against the nap of the trees sometimes. He was four inches taller than her, his stride ground-eating. Picking up on his urgency, very soon she was out of breath, rasping and forcing herself to keep up with him. They were at a high elevation and her body wasn’t used to it. All she could see around them was darkness and the outlines of trees. The NVGs made everything a grainy green, and she kept her gaze down so she wouldn’t stumble or trip over the rocks, some of them the size of cantaloupes and watermelons. It was a hard, rugged landscape, no question about that.

Dev Mitchell cursed silently as the Air Force pilot who had saved his life struggled to keep up. They had spent three hours on the run, getting as far away from the crash sites as they could. She was a trooper, had grit and never complained or asked him to slow down. The price of physical weakness would be capture, something he wanted to avoid at any cost. Once they breasted the first ridge, he stopped and told her to sit down and rest under a group of pine trees. Handing her a bottle of water, he stepped out to get the best radio signal he could find and called Bagram.

No stranger to the routine of being found by a SAR crew, Dev gave their GPS location. The answer he got in return chilled his blood. He had stepped away from Captain Whitcomb to make the call. She was green to what it meant to crash and then survive in this hellish country. Oh, he knew she had gone through all kinds of training, but this was the real thing, which was very different. Pulling out his notebook, he quickly wrote down some coordinates, shoving the pen back into his shirt pocket. Signing off, he quickly moved back to the pilot. Through his NVGs, he could see she had an oval face, a clean-looking nose and a nicely shaped mouth. Maybe in her mid-twenties at most. He was twenty-six himself. Liking her self-reliance, her pluck and determination, he knelt down in front of her, pushing up his NVGs.

“I contacted Bagram,” he said in a low tone, his face inches from her, not wanting his voice to carry in case Taliban were nearby. “They’ve given me coordinates for a place for us to hole up. It’s about a mile down the other side of this ridge.”

“Hole up?”

He heard the fatigue in her voice. The alarm. His mouth thinned for a moment. “I was informed we’re right in the middle of Taliban central. Where those birds crashed? We were a mile away from a large group of one hundred soldiers. Bagram has our location. They want us to go to a tunnel complex just down a mile on this ridge and hide out there. They can’t bring in a Search-and-Rescue, SAR, to fly us out until the Taliban leave this area so it’s safe enough to pick us up.”

Groaning, she said, “How long?”

“As long as it takes. No one knows. We’ll be safer resting in a cave or a tunnel complex during daylight hours.”

“Yeah, but the Taliban use them, too. Did they tell you that?”

He grinned. “Yes. This isn’t going to be easy, Captain Whitcomb.”

“My name’s Andy.”

“Call me Dev. Nice to meet you. Are you hydrated? Are you ready to hoof it?”

She nodded. “Let’s go.” She handed him half a bottle of water. “You need to drink, too.”

Taking it, he stood up and backed out of the grove, drinking the water she’d saved for him. There was a lot to like about this feisty female pilot. She was a team player; she thought of others and not just herself. As she joined him, he stuck the emptied plastic bottle into one of the thigh pockets of his flight suit. He didn. . .