Breanna hadn’t flown since crash-landing a Megafortress 26

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several weeks before. Her actions had won her an Air Force Cross—and a stay in the hospital for multiple injuries. But she’d just blown away the standard Megafortress simulations, proving she was fit to return to full duty.

In time, Breanna thought, to take Galatica up tomorrow for its first flight test after being repaired. She’d even be willing to take second seat if it meant flying her plane again.

Not that the planes belonged to anyone, exactly.

“Problem there, Captain?”

Breanna jerked around to find Clyde “Greasy Hands”

Parsons standing with a canvas tool bag a few feet from the ramp.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Ah, don’t let ’er get your goat, Captain. She’s always going around like she just stuck her butt in a power socket.” Parsons put his bag down and pulled a small tobacco tin from his pocket. He continued to speak as he wadded a tobacco plug into the side of his mouth. “She’s always looking to give someone a hard time’s all.”

“She’s doing her job, Chief,” said Breanna sharply.

Had she said that to any other chief master sergeant in the Air Force, the chief master sergeant would have snapped erect and walked on, undoubtedly cursing her under his breath. But Parsons and Breanna had been through a great deal together, and in fact the gray-haired chief liked to claim he’d been in the delivery room and pulled Breanna out from her mother’s womb.

An exaggeration, though not by much.

“You’re taking it all a bit hard, Bree,” said Greasy Hands gently. “Truth is, a lot of guys banged up like you were would take six months getting back, maybe more.”

“I wasn’t banged up.”

Banged up was what happened to her husband, a year RAZOR’S EDGE

27

and a half ago. That accident had cost him his legs—but not his career.

“You’re as stubborn as your old man. A real bee whacker,” said Greasy Hands, not without admiration. He started chewing his tobacco very deliberately.

“That’s a disgusting habit,” Breanna told him.

“Pretty much its main attraction.”

Breanna laughed as a small bit of tobacco juice drib-bled from his mouth.

“You’ll have a good flight tomorrow in Fort Two,” he said. “Garcia’s going along for the ride.”

“Oh no, not the Dylan freak!”

More tobacco squirted from Parsons’s mouth as he smirked. Garcia was one of Parsons’s best technical people, a whiz at both electrical and mechanical systems; supposedly he had once reassembled two turbofans blind-folded. But the staff sergeant was also an insufferable Dylan freak who saw fit to quote the master at every turn.

“Your dad wants everyone on the base to fly at least once a month. Garcia’s up,” said Parsons. “I told him not to touch nothin’ or you’d whack his fingers.”

“You did that on purpose,” Breanna told him. “You know I can’t stand Dylan.”

“Me? Never.”

Aboard Raven , over Dreamland Range 2

1620

IF THE MACHO WORLD OF FIGHTER JOCKS WAS EVER COMpared to a high school football team, Kevin Fentress would be the water boy. Maybe not even that. The short, skinny kid was also painfully shy, and hadn’t been the type to join teams or clubs in high school. In fact, most of his classmates would have been surprised to find he had 28

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gone to an Army recruiter one warm day toward the end of his junior year. Intelligent and very good with math, Fentress was hoping for a way to fund a college education. The recruiter spoke to him for a half hour before Fentress finally volunteered that his true wish was to fly aircraft. After a slight hesitation—and undoubtedly observing that the would-be recruit weighed less than an Al-ice pack—the soldier dutifully directed the young man to an Air Force sergeant down the hall. Fentress surprised the skeptical recruiter by blowing away not one, but three different aptitude tests. He eventually found his way into an ROTC program with high hopes of becoming a pilot.

He hadn’t, though, for a variety of reasons both complicated and uncomplicated. His tangled path through engineering and into robotics made sense if one kept in mind two things: the original aptitude scores, and the fact that in his whole history with the Air Force, Fentress had never expressed his personal wishes or desires to any superior officer. He had never questioned any order, let alone assignment, no matter how trivial. That alone meant he would never be a fighter jock—pilots seemed to have been bred to view orders not given under fire as optional requests.

Which did not mean that Fentress didn’t have personal wishes or desires. At the moment his dearest wish was to show his boss, Major Zen Stockard, that his selection as a pilot on the U/MF program—and the only pilot in the program besides Stockard—wasn’t a huge mistake.

“One last thing, Curly,” Zen said to him. “You have to always, always, always stay in the proper test range.” He clicked off the video replay of the test mission.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re not flying a Global Hawk or a Predator,” added Zen, mentioning two other projects Fentress had worked on. “This is real stuff.”

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29

“Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry, sir.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it.”

“Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry.”

Fentress tried to bite the words back. Major Stockard embodied everything he’d once dreamed of becoming—he was a bona fide member of the Right Stuff gang, an F-15 jock who’d shot down an Iraqi jet during the Gulf War. Testing the Flighthawks, he’d survived a hellacious accident that had cost him the use of his legs. Though confined to a wheelchair, he had won his way back to active duty. Not only did he head the Flighthawk program, but he had seen action over Somalia and Brazil.

“We try again tomorrow,” added Zen, his voice still harsh.

“Yes, sir. I’ll do better. I promise. I can do better.”

“I suggest you hit the simulator.”

“I will. The whole night,” said Fentress.

“Not the whole fucking night, Curly. Get some sleep.”

“Yes, sir,” said Fentress. “I will.”

The major wheeled himself away, shaking his head.

Dreamland

1800

“SOME OF THE D BOYS WERE PRAYING, I SWEAR TO GOD.”

Danny laughed so hard he nearly dropped the phone. His wife Jemma made a little coughing sound in acknowledgment. He knew from experience that it meant she wanted to change the subject, but he was having too good a time to stop.

“You shoulda seen Russ, the helo pilot, when we landed. White as a ghost. And he’s blacker than me,”

added Danny. He stretched back on his plush but very 30

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worn gold chair so his head touched the bookcase. “And Peiler. Shit.”

“Peiler is which?”

“Major running the Delta Force squad we just finished the exercises with. Smug son of a bitch is going home with his tail between his legs. Top dogs, huh? We whomped ’em!”

“I can’t keep track of all these names,” said Jemma.

Her tone was absent, distant—further away than the nearly three thousand miles between them.

“So what’d you do today?” asked Danny, finally taking her hints.

“As a matter of fact, I had lunch with James Stephens.”

Her voice changed dramatically; suddenly she was all perky and enthusiastic. “You remember him? He worked for Al D’Amato and George Pataki.”

Big-time New York state politicians—D’Amato a senator and Pataki the governor. Jemma was a black studies professor at NYU and heavily involved in politics; she was always dropping names of big shots.

“They’re Republicans,” she added. “Conservative Republicans.”

“And?”

“Jim Stephens is a good man to know,” she said. “He believes African-Americans need to be more involved.