Chapter 7
As the engines roared alive beneath me, Victor Sloan stepped close to the glass and mouthed four words.
"You should've stayed dead."
I smiled for the first time that morning. Then I pushed the throttle forward.
The recovery flight took fifty-one minutes. I will not describe the details of the sweep beyond what matters: terrain masking through two ridgelines, infrared confirmation of Hayes's position on cold ground beneath the tree canopy, a guard-frequency contact that confirmed he was conscious and mobile, and a hostile team closing from the southeast that I diverted with two low passes timed to the second. The recovery helicopter extracted Hayes at the eleven-minute mark of his twelve-minute window.
I landed back at Ellsworth with thirty seconds of fuel margin remaining, which Riker later told me was either the best flying he'd seen in a decade or the closest call he'd witnessed that didn't end in a hangar memorial. He did not specify which he believed more.
What happened in the following months did not unfold the way the easiest version of this story would have it.
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The eleven-year-old crash hearing was reopened — not because anyone wanted to reopen it, but because Anders's tablet search had triggered an automatic personnel flag the moment my biometric confirmation hit the Air Force system, and that flag could not be quietly closed once a colonel of Riker's standing had personally cleared me for emergency launch. The original hydraulic failure that killed Mark Danner was reexamined by a board that had access to maintenance logs Sloan had believed were permanently sealed.
They were not permanently sealed. They had been buried in a contractor's archive Sloan didn't know existed, the same archive that had quietly kept my biometric data current for eleven years under a deep-cover identity protocol I had never asked for and had spent over a decade trying to forget I still belonged to.
