She Walked Six Miles to Get Back to Her Bird

My name is Captain Casey "Viper" Callahan, and the last thing I remember clearly before the vehicle hit us was the way the dust hung in the air over Route 7 like something suspended in amber, beautiful and wrong at the same time, the kind of wrong your body recognizes before your brain catches up.

That was six miles east of the Kandahar perimeter.

Now I was standing on Pad Nine with my left palm flat against the nose of tail number 802, the desert sun hammering the tarmac to a hundred and ten degrees, and my own blood moving in a slow, dark line through the torn fabric of my civilian shirt. Three cracked ribs. A grade-two concussion that made the edges of my vision pulse with every heartbeat. The convoy that had been driving me back from the forward coordination meeting was currently a wreck on the shoulder of a road I was never supposed to have been on in the first place, and my base badge was somewhere in the dirt six miles east of where I was standing, which meant that to every set of eyes on this flight line, I was a battered civilian woman who had materialized next to a fifty-million-dollar aircraft and refused to explain herself.

I knew how it looked. I did not have the luxury of caring.

802 had been sitting on this pad waiting for me since 0600. I had been scheduled for a close air support tasking over Sector Four at 1400. It was now 1317, the pre-mission checks were done, the weapons were live, and I was the only pilot at Kandahar currently certified on this specific airframe's updated fire control configuration after the avionics upgrade three weeks ago. There was one other Strike Eagle on the line, but its pilot was grounded with a sinus infection that would have popped his eardrums at altitude, and the backup from Bagram was still forty minutes out.