Chapter 5
I made it up the ladder on my own. I have no complete memory of how, only that I did it and that each rung required a separate act of will and that by the time I dropped into the cockpit and Decker leaned in to help me with the harness because my left arm was not cooperating fully, we had burned four minutes from the klaxon and the extraction window for Sector Four was not getting any wider.
"You good?" Decker said. His voice had come down from the fury of the flight line. It was the voice he used when he needed an honest answer and needed it fast.
"Good enough," I said.
He held my eyes for one second. He had been my crew chief for three years. He knew what good enough meant coming from me, and he knew what it cost, and he pulled the ladder clear and sealed the canopy without another word because that was the language we had and it was sufficient.
The engines came up around me like a living thing, that deep specific vibration that had been the most reliable constant in my adult life, and I ran the checks with both hands moving through the sequence from memory, the concussion trying to push static into the edges of my vision and my hands not letting it matter, and then I was rolling and the tarmac was moving underneath me and the desert was opening up ahead of the nose and Sector Four was forty-two kilometers northeast and there were people on the ground who had been in contact for eleven minutes waiting for the sound of engines overhead.
May you like
I gave them engines.
The shot that ended the contact in Sector Four was logged at 1347. Eight soldiers were recovered without fatality. The after-action record noted that close air support arrived within the response window by a margin of four minutes.
