Part 2
Dana closed her eyes, and a sound she hadn’t heard in fifteen years came back through the cabin’s ventilation hum.
A man was calling for her over a radio. Behind his words came the hard, uneven crack of gunfire.
“Rook Three-Two, they’re coming around us. East side. We need you now.”
She was a captain again, strapped into an A-10C above a northern Iraqi valley in 2011. Dust had gathered in the creases of her gloves. The skin beneath her helmet itched with dried sweat, and the fuel figures on her display had passed the point where she wanted to look at them.
Below, twenty-two American soldiers were caught among rocks and scrub, their route out closed by enemy fire.
Dana had been holding above them for nearly three hours. Her wingman had left with a mechanical problem more than half an hour earlier. Since then, every request had come to her alone.
“Flint Six-Three, mark your location again.”
Master Sergeant Raymond Mercer gave her the coordinates. His voice stayed level until another burst of firing broke across it.
Dana checked the weapons display. Nothing left on the stations that would help them. The cannon still had ammunition.
“All I can give you is the gun, Ray.”
“Then give us the gun.”
She brought the targeting display across the slope. The strobes marking the Americans blinked in the dust. Beyond them, muzzle flashes appeared beneath the scrub.
“Confirm the separation.”
“Forty meters. We know.”
She pressed her shoulders into the seat and began the turn.
A controller’s voice interrupted on the other frequency. Radar activity had been detected near her sector. Her fuel state required an immediate return.
Dana kept her eyes on the valley.
“Ground element’s about to be overrun. I’m making a pass.”
The order came again, formal this time. She was to acknowledge and return to base.
She took that frequency out of her headset.
The valley offered very little room to correct a bad approach. She had studied maps of it, traced routes over photographs, listened to briefings in air-conditioned rooms. Now the smoke kept removing pieces of the ground, and men were waiting underneath it.
She rolled in.
“Down, Ray. Get everybody down.”
The aircraft settled into the line she needed. She held it through the first rise of instinct telling her to pull away, then fired.
The cannon’s vibration passed through the seat and into her jaw. On the ground, earth and brush erupted along the attackers’ position. She released the trigger and began to climb.
Ray was shouting that she’d hit them.
A warning flashed.
She caught the missile’s smoke for an instant against the ridge. Countermeasures streamed behind her, but the aircraft was still low and committed to the climb.
The impact struck beneath the right wing.
Her head slammed sideways. One display went black. Another filled with warnings while the aircraft rolled hard enough to drag the horizon out of sight.
She fought it level and tasted something metallic in her mouth.
“Rook’s hit. Fire. Losing control.”
Smoke entered the cockpit in a hot, dirty rush. She could no longer distinguish one alarm from another.
The command to eject reached her through Ray’s voice.
She gripped the ejection handles. Beyond the rocks, through the cracked canopy, the team’s strobes blinked in the dark.
Her falling jet was headed straight for those men.
“Not onto your men.”
She took the controls again.
The hydraulics were going. She brought in manual reversion and hauled against the stick with both hands. The damaged aircraft answered slowly, resisting her through every inch. She needed only enough of a turn to miss the position beneath her nose.
The rocks moved off to one side.
Then there was no more altitude.
Impact drove her forward against the straps. The cockpit broke around her. She heard metal tearing, felt heat on her left side, and tried to lift a leg that would not move.
For a moment she couldn’t understand why her boot was still there when she had already told it to come free.
Something heavy had crushed down across her knee.
Fire spread through the torn fabric beside her. She reached for the buckle, missed it, reached again. Her left hand wasn’t doing what she asked.
She remembered thinking how ordinary the last piece of sky looked through the shattered canopy.
Then a boot hit the wreck above her.
Ray Mercer climbed across the broken nose and tore at the canopy frame. He wasn’t wearing gloves. His hands slipped, caught, pulled again. Dana tried to tell him about her leg, but smoke took the words.
He got an arm under her and dragged.
Pain cleared everything else from her head.
A moment later she was on the ground. He was hauling her by the shoulders, getting distance between them and the aircraft. Cannon rounds began to burst in the wreck behind him.
He rolled her hard into the dirt and beat at the flames on her flight suit.
“Stay with me, Captain.”
She couldn’t see his face clearly. Dust clung to the sweat on his cheeks, and there was blood near his mouth.
He bent over her again.
“God help me, I’m getting you out.”
A seat-belt buckle clicked beside her.
Dana opened her eyes to the narrow cabin, the blue upholstery, Victor Alden’s abandoned laptop. Her hands were locked around the canvas straps in her lap.
The two officers were still standing.
“Please,” she said. “Sit down.”
Nathan lowered his hand. Peter did the same, but Nathan didn’t return to his seat. He came down the aisle and crouched beside her, catching his elbow against a seat arm on the way.
“Sorry,” he murmured to its occupant.
Then he faced Dana at eye level.
“I should’ve introduced myself first. Captain Nathan Mercer.” His voice caught briefly. “Ray Mercer was my dad.”
She looked at him properly then.
Without the distance between their rows, the resemblance was almost painful. The shape of his brow. The stubborn mouth. Even the way he waited for her to answer, holding himself still so she wouldn’t feel hurried.
“Ray’s boy?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She reached toward him and stopped just short of his shoulder. He closed the small space himself, letting her hand rest against the blue wool.
“I was eleven when it happened,” he said. “Dad got back about six months later. He sat with me on our porch. I thought I was in trouble because he kept looking at me and not talking.”
Nathan rubbed a thumb along the seam of his trousers.
“Then he told me about you. About why you stayed in the airplane.”
Dana shook her head once.
“He said I still had him because of a pilot who wouldn’t let go.”
“Your father got me out,” she said. “He burned his hands doing it.”
“He never talked much about that part.”
“He should have.”
Nathan tried to smile. It didn’t quite form.
Dana kept her hand on his shoulder. The boy on the porch was a captain now. Fifteen years had gone somewhere while she was busy getting through appointments, learning which stairs she could manage, finding clothes that didn’t catch against tender skin.
Beside her, Victor slowly closed his computer. He held it between both palms, uncertain where to put it.
Nathan glanced down at Dana’s hand. For a moment, she thought he was about to ask about the burns. Instead, he drew a breath that seemed to hurt him.
“Dad died Friday. Four days ago.”
His eyes stayed on hers.
“The doctors connected it to his service. They think it was the burn pits…”
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