by Susan Grant
“So how did you become Banzai?” he demanded.
“On Pedigree Night.” Although it had been a year and a half since that night, she remembered every detail. Forced to buy—and drink—rounds of beer at the squadron’s favorite local dive, she had the mission as the new pilot that night to maintain enough wits to offer up a relative worthy of the honor “badass ancestor.” Squadron lore said that unless you could come up with a kick-ass relative, you couldn’t prove your fighter pilot pedigree. From then on, you were a mixed-breed, affectionately known in the squadron as a pound puppy. But Bree hadn’t even broken a sweat. She had Great-grandmother Michiko.
“She was four foot eleven, but she put the fear of God in every man in my family, and all of them were over six feet tall,” Bree told Cajun. “The whole family owes our patriotism to her. She drilled it into us from birth.” Bree threw her hand over her vest. “You’d better stand when they played ‘The Star-spangled Banner,’ and put your hand over your heart when you sang it or, oh, boy, Great-grandmother would be all over you. She loved her country. Her motto was ‘don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of the unlived life.’ Well, she lived hers. She would have gone off to fight in World War Two if they’d let her. Instead, she spent the war in a Japanese internment camp, even though she was born and raised in Omaha. It tested her patriotism, she said, but didn’t erode it. She got out, married a burly Roman Catholic Italian from the Bronx, and sent three sons off to serve in the marines.”
One of them was Bree’s grandfather, Sergeant Lou Vitale, a Medal of Valor winner who said his only surrender came after trying to produce a son to carry on the family’s military tradition. He fathered seven daughters, none of whom had the remotest interest in the armed services. Then Bree came along.
She was the product of the second youngest of those prim daughters and an auto mechanic of Irish descent. Her mother would buy her Barbie dolls, but she’d give each one a proper military haircut before sticking it in the cockpit of her plastic GI-Joe jet fighter. Grandpa Vitale would watch her play, a cigarette clasped in his callused fingers, his eyes shining with delight. He’d told her that she got her sass from her great-grandmother. Sass, Bree later learned, was what his generation called guts in a female. She wished he’d lived to see her accept an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Bree zipped her jacket higher against the chill, and to ward off the weird sensation that swelled in the space around her heart. She missed the old man. “So, Cajun, to answer your question, when the squadron elected my great-grandmother, I toasted her victory, and someone shouted banzai! Then they all started yelling it. Ever since, that’s what everyone’s called me.” She winked mischievously at Cajun. “Sweet thing.”
“I told you,” he said. “If you’re going to call me that, you’re going to explain it to me later.”
“There’s always the risk you’ll learn more than you want to know.”
“We’ll see about that, Banzai-baby.” He cuffed her again before they separated, headed for their individual aircraft.
“See you up there, Bree,” Cam said, and walked off, too. Bree watched her go. Even dressed in a flight suit and combat boots, her wingman moved with bred-in feminine grace.
Cam’s mother was a southern belle from a wealthy Georgia family and her father was an army general. Cam was supposed to have gone straight from charm school to hosting soirees for a West Point-grad husband. Instead, she’d pursued an appointment to the Air Force Academy. Tall, willowy, and blond, she defied expectations every step of the way, graduating at the top of her undergraduate pilot training class and kicking butt all the way through fighter lead-in training. She was Chuck Yeager crossed with Scarlet O’Hara, a top gun soaked with southern charm. Despite enormously different upbringings, Bree and Cam had become close friends.
But the strangest feeling swept over Bree as she watched Cam walk away. What was it? Something like affection mixed with regret, a sense of loss. A chill spun up her spine and she frowned. Stupid. Nothing was going to happen to Cam. But she shook her head as if it would clear her thoughts. Bad karma. She didn’t like it.
Just be extra careful out there, she told herself.
Bree dropped her helmet bag by the front nose tire so she could inspect the sleek, gunmetal-gray F-16 that was hers for the next few hours. To her, the fighter was breathtaking, like a piece of modern art, all smooth lines and sharp turns—beautiful in a deadly way, like a bird of prey.
She walked around the perimeter of the F-16, checking for general airworthiness, and for signs of possible trouble that could take the form of puddles of fluid on the tarmac below the jet as well as stains on the fuselage itself. But today everything seemed to be in order, as usual.
Finishing up, she waved to the arriving crew chief, the airman who would guide her through the engine-start and taxi-out, and then climbed up a ladder into the cockpit, high above the ground. It wrapped around her snugly, that cockpit, as if the jet were custom-made for her.
Inside, she connected her g-suit to an air hose. Then, with an assortment of clips and straps, she attached herself to a seat that contained everything she needed for survival in the unlikely event of ejection: more survival kits, a radio, a GPS unit, a life raft, and, of course, her parachute. After her seat belt clicked closed, she donned her helmet, leaving the mask loose for the moment.
She poked her gloved thumb in the air, telling the crew chief that she was ready to start her engine. As soon as he acknowledged her hand signal, Bree lowered the clear, rounded canopy. It sealed her inside. She ran through her checklists, read from the booklet she’d strapped to her thigh. Everything not bolted, glued, or strapped to something was destined to fly around the cockpit. No pilot wanted that. You had enough to hold your attention outside the jet; you didn’t need to create threats on the inside.
With a flick of her finger, the powerful engine rumbled to life. She checked her instruments for the engine’s health, then put her hands up and in plain sight so the base weapons folks could remove the safeties on her guns. They wouldn’t have touched her aircraft otherwise. She couldn’t blame them; it must be disconcerting enough looking down the muzzle of a loaded gun without having to sweat the pilot’s finger resting on the trigger.
Then it was time to leave. Bree taxied out, Cam behind her. She always looked over her wingman’s aircraft, but she stared at Cam’s a little longer than usual as the feeling of foreboding made a return appearance. Cam was fine, she told herself. Everything would be fine. It was a routine sortie. Bree forced her eyes to the runway ahead of her. The sky was turning from gray to blue, clear and cloudless. You were born for this, remember? Born to fly. Bree’s spirits lifted with the rising sun. Nothing was going to happen to Scarlet. They were off for a little patrol duty and then would call it a day. That was all. “Razor flight’s ready,” she told the control tower.
“Razor flight cleared for takeoff.”
The tower controller’s voice came through her helmet headset. “Roger,” she replied. “Razor flight cleared for takeoff.”
“Two.” Cam’s response told her that she’d heard and understood the tower’s instructions. Clearance for their “flight” meant clearance for them both. Cam would be rolling down the runway within seconds of Bree’s liftoff.
Bree pushed the throttle up. The engine didn’t rumble to life; it exploded—a multimegaton kick in the pants. Acceleration slammed her shoulder blades into the seat, and within seconds she was above a hundred knots and heading for twice that. The sheer force of the fighter never failed to awe her. All that power, in her control.
At rotation speed, Bree wrapped a gloved hand around the control stick of her F-16 and pulled back gently, sending the jet skyward. A glance over her shoulder told her that Cam was airborne, too.
Soon, Cam fell back to a tactical position a mile and a half behind her. Together, they headed to the airspace high above the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea, which they’d parallel from sea to shining sea—in other words,
they’d race from the Yellow Sea in the west all the way across to the Sea of Japan, a body of water known as the Eastern Sea to the Koreans.
Bree leveled off at twenty thousand feet, relatively low, as cruise altitudes went, but where she’d been ordered to fly. Speeds and altitudes scrolled over the HUD—her heads-up display. The threads of data on a clear canopy showed her everything she needed to know. Down below, a few bomb craters were sooty footprints in the snow, evidence of a conflict that had people across an entire planet sitting on the edges of their seats. Bree got comfortable in hers and began what she hoped would be just another day in the office.
Somewhere high above her jet a modified 747 airliner bristling with radar and intelligence personnel eavesdropped on her radio calls to Cam. Iris could relay warning to the fighters, speaking to them directly, all while coordinating with the region’s military commanders—and Washington, if needed. The integrated battlefield.
Ahead, the Yellow Sea gleamed like a sheet of stainless steel littered with cotton ball clouds. No threats, good weather. So far, so good. Bree thought of the bad vibes she’d felt before takeoff, and blamed them on too much sugar for breakfast. Sweet Thing might be buying the beers at the Officers Club after they landed, but Bree would get Scarlet a drink. It was the least she could do, after having spent the better part of the last hour fretting like a mother hen about the woman’s safety. Cam wouldn’t appreciate the solicitousness. Most of the time, Bree was better at dampening her predisposition to be overprotective, to manipulate the parameters of her life so that no one got hurt. She was aware that the root cause was a psychological scar from killing her little brother.
Okay, technically, she hadn’t killed him, but she’d been responsible: Brendan died while in her protection, and that was almost the same in her mind. The child therapists hired by her parents to help her through the tragedy had anticipated that reaction, and had used everything in their psychological bag of tricks to eradicate it from her six-year-old psyche after she took her brother and the family canoe for a joyride in the local stream. It wasn’t the first stunt she’d pulled as a kid, and it wasn’t the last, but never again would she have Brendan to take along with her. Spring rains had made the water faster and the canoe harder to control than she’d expected. She’d lost control. The canoe overturned and jammed between river boulders with her trapped beneath it. It was so dark and noisy she didn’t realize at first that she was alone. But by then, Brendan had drowned, swept downstream where a neighbor found his body.
It had messed her up for a while, as a kid. Even now, most of what she’d consider her quirks stemmed from that day. She was an overprotective control freak who was afraid of the dark. Not that anyone would guess that about her. She could be such a “guy” when it came to sharing private doubts and feelings. It was one reason why she was better at flying than long-term relationships. Not that she was complaining; she liked being single. She liked having fun.
A burst of random radio static yanked Bree’s mind back where it belonged: in the here and now, where she didn’t have the luxury of letting her thoughts wander. She rolled up on a wing and turned back to the shore. Here, the landscape was very rugged and remote. The forest came almost to the beach, what there was of one: a narrow and rocky strip of sand, decorated she’d bet with mines and barbed wire instead of Pepsi bottles and empty containers of Coppertone. Another burst of static caught her attention as the coastline rolled under the belly of her jet.
Cam shouted: “Razor-two, Radar, RAW, hits bearing two-two-zero!”
Bree’s pulse jumped with a surge of adrenaline. RAW was shorthand for radar alert warning. Cam’s threat warning system had gone off. A radar site on the ground had turned on to take a look, telling them that somewhere down there a North Korean surface-to-air missile operator was tracking Cam as a cat stalked a mouse. It might want to pounce ...or it might simply want to play. You never knew. But you had to treat every blip as a potential threat.
Bree answered quickly so Cam would know that her own jet hadn’t picked up anything. “Razor-one is negative.” She hated surprises like this. She’d read the intelligence briefing that morning, and it had been clean. Then she remembered a recent report on the North’s shoulder-launched missiles. It was impossible to keep track of those. They could be loaded in a car and driven anywhere. Worse, an actual visual sighting of an aircraft wasn’t necessary, as it had been in the old days. All anyone needed to complete the deal was a cooperative radar operator to help find a target. Then everyone with a personal missile launcher could fire away.
“Iris, what have you got for Razor flight?” The surveillance plane would have heard Cam’s radio call.
“Stand by. We’re checking it out.”
“Checking it out,” she muttered to herself. They could afford to sound that laid-back; they were sitting in a safer place than her wingman. But Bree tried to be patient. The intelligence gatherers were good, very good, and they’d saved her butt plenty of times, but they weren’t perfect. They couldn’t possibly keep track of every stray missile battery in North Korea.
Bree’s threat warning system light illuminated. A swell of adrenaline froze her concentration into absolute focus. Her voice was calmer than she felt. “Razor-one has RAW. Nine o’clock.”
“Two!”
She glanced from the warning light to her HUD, and then to the sky. It had been only seconds since Cam had reported her warning. Now someone was looking at Bree, also. But radar alone didn’t pose a threat. Every fighter pilot knew it. The guys on the ground could aim all they wanted, but unless they were close enough, anything they lobbed over would fall short—and Bree was going to take care of that right now.
She accelerated, climbing to a higher altitude, anxious to put distance between her and the unknown threat before it became more than that. Cam followed, a half mile behind her. She’d rather go south than farther north, and she hoped Cam realized that, but the people on the ground checking them out were in that direction, keeping them on the northern side of the border. It almost smelled like a setup. But what could the North hope to gain by shooting aircraft engaged in operation Keep the Peace? With tensions as high as they were, it didn’t make sense.
A loud alarm filled Bree’s headset. She warned, using the radio, “Missiles!”
“Tallyho!” Cam shouted back.
Bree looked over her shoulder, craning her neck. There! Telltale white plumes of launched SAMs.
The ice in her veins surged like an arctic dam breaking. “Counter, counter,” Bree’s threat warning system suggested in a female voice. But Bree was already releasing chaff and flying evasive maneuvers. Missiles came at you at supersonic speed. Confusing the little buggers was the only way out.
“Counter, counter.”
Bree gripped the control stick, wrenching it sideways, and pulled. Her vision narrowed. The sudden onset of G-forces was almost too much for her suit and body to fight. She tightened her leg and stomach muscles to squeeze the blood pooling in her lower body back up to where she needed it most—in her head. Her oxygen mask slid down her sweaty face. Harsh breaths roared in her ears as she sucked air into her squashed lungs.
Radio chatter filled her headset. Bree realized belatedly that Iris was transmitting something about confirmed reports of SAMs in the air. Well, duh. Sorry, no time to chew the fat. Gotta get rid of this missile on my ass.
The aerial battle exerted tremendous forces on her body, alternating between the bone-crushing force of gravity and negative g’s that propelled her insides upward and out. The missile streaked past. Woo hoo! It had missed! Thank you, God. But the missile passed her by only to lock on to Cam.
Bree’s mood changed instantly. She was in a position to have a good visual on both of them. “Razor-two—missile at eight o’clock, low!” But Cam wouldn’t have a visual. The SAM was in her blind spot: underneath and slightly behind. “Break right,” Bree directed. “Break right!”
Cam flipped over on her right wingtip. The missile followe
d.
On Bree’s HUD, Cam’s jet was one of many shapes, whirling in a dizzying video-game battle. With her naked eye, she saw two birds of prey, one guided by mindless, mechanical technology, the other by human hands.
The missile looked as if it would miss, fooled by countermeasures and some amazing evasive flying. But then it came around, its plume of white vapor sweeping in a graceful arc. Bree stared in horror. “Razor-two, reverse left—reverse left!” Sweat stung her eyes. “Missile in your six, closing fast.” Come on, Scarlet, come on.
The SAM was a half mile behind. And then a quarter mile. Dread tightened her throat. “Harder left!”
Bree jerked, startled as smoke and debris made sudden daytime fireworks. Cam!
Ah, God. There couldn’t be a worse thing to witness than watching your best friend take a direct hit.
In the seconds that followed, Bree searched the smoky sky, fighting the emotion that if let loose would shatter her concentration. Then she saw it, an open parachute, and it was the most beautiful sight in the world. Even better was the glimpse of Cam’s long legs dangling beneath the silk. Her wingman plunged down toward hills bordered by a U-shaped swatch of darker trees, a crescent of green in a vast sea of gray-blue conifers. At the speed of light, Bree committed the sight to memory.
A warning alarm trilled in her headset. She wrenched her attention back inside. Lights in the cockpit flashed at her. A stoic computer-generated voice urged: “Counter, counter.”
The other missile was locked on her!
Cam’s ejection had sidetracked Bree—for only a few dozen heartbeats. But that distracted fraction of a minute might have been a fatal mistake. She gritted her teeth and hauled back on the control stick to bank away from the threat. Massive forces crammed her into her seat. Not enough. Need more. After what she saw happen to Cam, she knew it’d take every countermeasure, everything in her bag of tricks to escape.
