Chapter 11Attack on the Drinwich Airfield

Baxter, Halloran, Coster, Kate, Pike

Jenkins had a pencil behind each ear and a third in his hand, which Baxter had learned to read as arithmetic.

“Don't,” Jenkins said, without looking up, “ask me how it's going.”

“How's it going?”

“Badly. Sit down. Not there, that's a torque wrench.”

Baxter moved the torque wrench and sat on the edge of the trolley. Jenkins had a stores ledger open across his knees and a sheet of figures beside it, columns of them, some crossed out and rewritten in a hand that grew smaller and angrier as it went down the page. Above them Ray's Hornet stood with its panels open, and from somewhere beneath its left wing came the steady sound of Dutch doing something methodical to it.

“I'm working out what we spend,” Jenkins said. “Per sortie. Fuel, missiles, rounds, parts, the lot. Pike wants a figure for the people at Snider's Top so they understand why we keep asking them for things they haven't got.” He tapped the bottom of the page with the pencil. “That's Joker One. On his own.”

Baxter looked at the figure. He looked at it for some time.

“That's every sortie?”

“That's an average. Theve was worse. Deltheim was worse. He goes through gun ammunition like a man trying to empty the sea with a bucket.” Jenkins wrote something else down. “I'm not complaining. I'm just saying somebody's got to make the bucket.”

“Cheaper per kill than anyone else aboard,” said Dutch, from under the wing.

Jenkins took the pencil out of his mouth. “That's not the comfort you think it is.”

“Wasn't meant as comfort, Major. Just arithmetic.”

“Everything's arithmetic till it isn't.” Jenkins turned a page in the ledger, frowned at it, and turned it back. Then he looked at Baxter over the top of it with an expression Baxter had seen on him once before, when a landing-gear strut had come back from an inspection with nothing wrong with it at all and Jenkins had refused to believe it for two days.

“He was down here at half five,” he said.

“Ray?”

“Who else. Asked me to change his load for this afternoon. More rounds, as many as I could get in. And he wanted two of the short-range jobs on the outboard stations instead of the bombs. The little ones. The ones you'd use for something small and slow.” Jenkins put the ledger down. “I asked him what for. You know what he said?”

“I can guess how many words.”

“One.” Jenkins held up a finger. “Drones.”

Baxter waited for the rest of it. Under the wing, Dutch had stopped working.

“Nobody's said anything about drones,” Jenkins said. “Intelligence hasn't. Pike hasn't. Briefing's not till two. I went and checked the threat summary, in case I'd missed something, and I hadn't. There's nothing in it about drones. Not one word.”

“Did you load them?”

“Course I loaded them.” Jenkins looked at the pencil in his hand as though it had let him down. “You learn.”

Dutch came out from under the wing, wiping his hands. He was a big man and moved slowly, the way big men often did on a ship, as if he'd long ago measured every hatch aboard and come to terms with them. He folded the rag and put it in his pocket.

“He checked the seat kits again,” he said.

Jenkins sighed. “Again?”

“Every seat. Same as every morning there's a sortie. Counted the water.” Dutch said it the way he'd have reported a tyre pressure. “Queen's as well. He did Queen One's first.”

Nobody said anything to that. Jenkins went back to his figures. Baxter found that he was looking at the open panels on Ray's aircraft without seeing them, and made himself stop.

He was saved by Tasha, who came across the hangar with a record held flat against her chest in both arms, the way people carried things they had been told were valuable.

“Bax. Have you seen Will?”

“Not since breakfast. Is that his?”

“He left it in the ready room.”

“He didn't leave it,” said Coster, arriving behind her from the other direction with the slightly hunted look of a man who had been searching for something for some time. “I put it down.”

“On the chair.”

“On my chair.”

“It's not your chair. It's the ready room. Nobody owns the chairs.” Tasha held the record out to him, then didn't quite let go of it. “I listened to it.”

Coster stopped looking hunted. He tried, briefly, to look offended instead, and couldn't manage it.

“Which side?”

“Both.”

“And?”

“Track four is still slow.”

“It isn't slow. It's patient.”

“It's slow, William.” She let go of the record. “The second side's good, though. The one after track four. I liked that one.”

Coster held the record as if she had handed him something else entirely. Jenkins, who had looked up at the word patient, met Baxter's eyes over the ledger with an expression of deep and silent enquiry. Baxter returned it blankly and got up.

“Briefing at two,” he said. “Both of you. And—” He lowered his voice, though there was nobody to hear but Jenkins and Dutch, who had both heard it already. “If you see anything this afternoon that looks like a drone, anything at all, call it at once. Don't wait to be sure.”

“Drones?” Coster said. “Nobody's said anything about drones.”

“No,” said Baxter. “Nobody has.”

Pike said intact five times in the first ten minutes of the briefing, and Baxter stopped counting after that because it was clearly going to be the theme.

Drinwich had been a Federation supply base before the war, tucked into a high valley in the Rigley Mountains where the road came over from the coast. The Sotoans had taken it in the first month and had been using it since. Its magazines were still full. So were its fuel bunkers. Long Shot had drawn every surviving FCU unit within reach toward Snider's Top, and every one of them had arrived with more people than weapons.

“So we are not going to Drinwich to destroy anything,” Pike said. “We are going to Drinwich to collect it.”

She put the map up. Two helicopter groups, Spread One and Spread Two, would come in by the northern and southern routes, carrying Humvee units that would deploy at the airfield and take it building by building. Joker would cover Spread One on the northern route. Queen had Spread Two in the south. The Harriers from Dauntless would work the outer defences.

“The stores are marked.” She tapped them, one after another: the magazines along the eastern side of the field, the fuel bunkers to the north, the hangars between. “If any of those go up, we lose what we came for and probably the people standing next to it. Guns and missiles inside the perimeter. Bombs outside it, or not at all.”

The weapons officer took them through loadouts after her. Most of the wing would carry bombs for the approach routes, he said, and he reminded them about landing weight, apologetically, as though it were his fault. Anything they didn't drop would have to come home with them, and a carrier would only take so much aircraft back aboard. Anything over the limit went into the sea.

“We are short of bombs,” he said. “Please don't throw them away unless you have to.”

Baxter marked the stores on his own map and then marked where the ground force would be at each phase, which was the part he actually cared about. He raised his hand when Pike paused.

“When we're called in on a target near the magazines, who confirms where the Humvees are?”

“The ground commander, through Dealer. Captain Lund.” Pike made a note. “I'll make sure he knows you'll ask.”

“He will,” said Everson, not quite quietly enough, and Cruz kicked his chair.

Pike went through the threats. SAMs on the approaches, MiG-29s out of an airstrip to the west, armour around the base, the usual. Then she put her pen down.

“There's nothing in the summary about drones,” she said, “so we don't expect them. If you see anything unusual on the field, call it.”

Baxter didn't look at Ray. He didn't need to. He looked at Kate instead, because something made him, and found that she had already turned her head along the table toward the far end where Joker One sat with the target sheet in his hands.

Everyone else in the room had looked faintly puzzled at the mention of drones, the way people look at a thing they hadn't been thinking about. Ray hadn't. He hadn't looked up at all.

Kate looked at him for a moment longer than Baxter would have expected. Then she turned back to her map, and made a small mark on it, and Baxter would have given a good deal to know what it was.

At the Queen end of the table, Nguyen glanced down at his wristwatch, and then, with the expression of a man adding a figure to a column, back up at his lead.

The tankers came up out of the haze over the foothills at 1540, two of them, broad and slow and pale against the afternoon. They had been Majestic's once. Queen had stolen them back out of Port Edwards with D.D.'s access code and a great deal of nerve, and now they flew themselves, patient and uncomplaining, in a long racetrack over the mountains while the strike lined up behind them.

The order put Queen on the first tanker and Joker on the second, which ought to have been the end of it. Then Queen Three's probe wouldn't extend, and the order shuffled, and Baxter, coming up behind, saw that Ray was now sitting directly behind Queen One.

Fifty feet. Perhaps a little less. Kate's Hornet hung on the drogue in front of him, rising and falling a few feet with the air, and Ray's Hornet rose and fell with it as if the two aircraft were tied together, holding his place behind her with a steadiness that made Baxter's own station-keeping feel like an argument.

It took three minutes for her to take on fuel. Three minutes was a long time to hold an aircraft that still. Baxter watched him do it. He watched him not look anywhere else. There was nowhere else to look, of course; that was the point of the position. But Baxter had sat behind a tanker himself a great many times, and he knew that you looked at your instruments, at the tanker, at your own hands, at the sky, at anything, because three minutes of looking at the same aircraft was a long time.

Ray's helmet didn't move once.

“This is my favourite part,” Tasha said on Joker's channel. She was sitting off Coster's wing, waiting her turn, and sounded entirely content. “Isn't it? Everything slows down. Everyone's close, and quiet, and careful. You're four hundred knots over a mountain and it feels like sitting in a kitchen.”

“You'd have very strange kitchens,” said Coster.

“I think it's the most beautiful thing in aviation.”

“More than sunrise?”

She considered. “Equal.”

Nobody else answered her. Ahead, Ray's Hornet held its place.

Then Kate came on the common channel, mildly, as though she were remarking on the weather.

“Joker One, Queen One. You can breathe, you know.”

There was a pause. Baxter heard it go on a little longer than a pause ought to. He thought, absurdly, of the open channel on the way home from Meriton, and the three seconds of nothing.

“Thank you, Queen One,” Ray said.

It was quiet and perfectly level, and it went out to everyone. Baxter heard the tiny click of somebody in Queen keying a microphone and then thinking better of it. On Joker's channel Coster drew a breath and didn't use it.

It was, Baxter realised, the first time Ray had ever said her call sign without being told to. He had said it the way Baxter had once heard a man in a church say a name in a list of the dead: carefully, so as not to drop it.

Somewhere on the common channel, very faintly, someone in Queen laughed and turned it into a cough.

“It was unnerving,” said Kate, to nobody, in the voice of a woman making a professional observation. “Holding station like that. Like a statue. Somebody ought to tell him.”

Nobody told her that somebody just had.

Kate came off the drogue and slid clear. Ray moved up into the space she'd left. His helmet stayed exactly where it was.

In nineteen years Chief Warrant Officer Pat Halloran had never once trusted a fighter pilot.

It wasn't personal. It was arithmetic. A fighter pilot flew at four hundred knots, three miles up, and saw the war as a map with coloured pins in it. A helicopter pilot flew at a hundred and twenty knots, fifty feet off the ground, and saw it as a valley full of people trying to kill her. They weren't in the same war. When the fast movers said we'll cover you, what they meant was we'll be somewhere above you, doing something more interesting, and in nineteen years she had never once been given reason to think otherwise.

So when the planning cell at Snider's Top said the Drinwich lift would have Navy cover off the Endurance, she'd nodded and not believed a word of it. Then she'd gone out to her aircraft and told Sergeant Pruitt to load every flare they owned.

She had seen D.D.'s post about Theve, the one with the eight boats. She'd read it twice. It had struck her as the first honest thing the Navy had put out in months, precisely because it admitted they hadn't got ashore. She liked people who could say they'd failed. It made her more inclined to believe them when they said they hadn't.

It didn't make her believe in the Wings of Theve. Nobody at Snider's Top believed in the Wings of Theve. He was a poster.

Spread One came up the northern valley at 1612, eight helicopters in a long staggered line with the river beneath them and the slopes going up on either side into rock and old snow. The light was already going gold on the high ridges. Down where Halloran was, it was mostly shadow.

The first launcher was dug in on the left-hand slope, two miles short of the bend. She knew it was there because the warning tone went in her headset and she was already calling the break, already reaching for the flares, when the slope where it had been opened up in a long orange gout of fire and simply stopped being a launcher.

She didn't see the jet. She felt it. Something went over her rotor disc so low that the whole aircraft shook in its wake, and was gone up the valley ahead of her before she could turn her head.

The next position was half a mile on, a gun in a notch of the right-hand ridge. It died before it fired. So did the one after. She saw that one go: a grey shape coming down the valley wall at her own height, below the ridge line, so low she could see the shadow of it moving on the rock beside it, and a burst of gunfire that seemed to start before the jet had even turned toward the target.

“North route, Joker Two,” said a calm, dry voice in her headset. “You're clear to the bend. Keep coming.”

Halloran keyed her microphone. “Joker, North Lead. Who the hell is your lead?”

A short pause.

“That,” said Joker Two, “is the Wings of Theve.”

She didn't answer. She was watching him.

She would try to describe it afterward, more than once, to people who hadn't been there, and she never managed it. It wasn't the speed, though he was fast, or the shooting, though she'd never seen shooting like it. It was the way the jet moved through the valley, as though the valley had been cut for it. He never flew above them. He flew down in the shadow with them, at their height, along their route, and every turn he made was the only turn there could possibly have been, so clean that it looked like something that had always been going to happen. She had watched display teams. She had watched birds. She had never in her life seen anything so beautiful as that grey jet going up the valley ahead of her in the last of the light, killing everything that might have killed her before it knew she was there.

Beside her, Sergeant Pruitt, who had been her crew chief for six years and had never once said anything good about a fast mover, keyed the intercom.

“Chief,” he said, in a voice of quiet wonder. “I think I'm in love.”

“Get in line,” said her co-pilot.

The valley turned north. Up ahead, two more jets were working the positions on the high ground, steadily and carefully, and a third was keeping station above the line of helicopters, weaving gently over them like a dog walking beside a flock. Their voices came and went on the net.

“Three, launch, left side, the scree slope.”

“I see it. Four, can you—”

“Got it. You're clear.”

“Thank you.”

“You don't have to say thank you every time.”

“I'll say thank you if I want to.”

“Fine. You're welcome.”

“Thank you.”

Halloran listened to three more exchanges of this kind. Then, because nineteen years had to be good for something, she keyed her microphone.

“Joker, North Lead. Are those two always like that?”

“Like what?” said Three and Four, at exactly the same moment.

Joker Two didn't answer at all, which Halloran thought was probably answer enough.

The MiG-29s came over the western ridge at 1620, four of them, fast and low and well flown. Baxter called them and turned to cover the helicopters. He had a surface position in front of him and a launcher beyond that, and he took the first while Coster went for the second, and above them Ray went up to meet the MiGs.

The first pair died almost together. The third broke away. The fourth was good.

Baxter saw it in the corner of his attention while he came off his own target. The MiG pilot knew his aircraft and knew the valley, and when Ray turned on him he didn't run. He turned too, hard and tight, using the slope, and for a moment the two aircraft went round each other above the ridge like a pair of swifts. Baxter saw the Hornet's line begin to change. It was nothing anyone else would have noticed, a roll a fraction wider than it needed to be, a turn that went on a little longer than the geometry required. It was the thing he had seen at White Valley, and again over Newfield with Darre, and he felt his stomach tighten.

Then Spread Two came up on the common net, from far away in the south, a helicopter pilot calling a launch and Kate's voice behind him, steady, answering.

The Hornet snapped straight. It happened as abruptly as a man stepping back from the edge of a platform. The next turn was the only turn there could have been, and the MiG died at the end of it.

Baxter brought his eyes back to the ground. He had a line of helicopters under him and a scree slope full of people with launchers, and he was the one who was supposed to be watching them.

“Spread One, Joker Two. You're clear past the bend. Next threat's the cut on the right, I'm on it.”

“North Lead copies,” Halloran said. “Joker Two, your lead's a lunatic.”

“Yes,” said Baxter. “I know.”

The first call from the south came at 1626.

“Joker, Queen One.” Kate's voice was clipped and quick. “Spread Two has a launcher we can't see. It's under the trees on the eastern slope and it's tracking our lead helicopter. We need eyes on it from above the ridge. Can you spare one?”

Baxter looked at his own valley. Spread One was through the worst of it. He had Coster and Tasha with him, and Halloran's line was moving well.

“Joker One, south,” he said. “I'll keep Three and Four with Spread One.”

He needn't have said it. Ray's Hornet was already gone over the ridge.

The launcher died ninety seconds later. Kate called it, briefly, and thanked Joker, and Ray came back over the ridge and took up his place above Spread One again as though he had never left it. Baxter watched him go and come back, and noticed that he came back more slowly than he went.

The second call came at 1641, and it didn't come at all, really. It never got that far.

“Joker, Queen One, fighters inbound on Spread Two from the southwest, we're going to need—”

Ray was moving before she reached fighters. Baxter saw it on his display and then out of the canopy, the Hornet already rolling out over the southern ridge and accelerating, already gone, while Kate was still in the middle of the sentence. As though he had known Spread Two was about to need him before Spread Two did.

“Joker One,” Baxter said. “Confirm you're south.”

He expected the two clicks. He was already composing the position report he'd have to give Queen on Ray's behalf.

“Moving,” Ray said.

One word, to Kate, on the common channel. Baxter heard what was in it. He couldn't have explained it to anyone, but he had flown beside this man for a little over a month and had heard him say perhaps forty words in all that time, and he knew what it cost him to make that one. It was the sound of a man reaching for a door handle he had promised himself he wouldn't touch.

“Queen One copies,” Kate said, and there was a fractional pause in it that wasn't there before.

Ray arrived over Spread Two early. He took the handover exactly as Queen had written it into the brief after Theve, the boundary to the letter, the targets Queen gave him and not one more. Baxter could follow it on the net: Kate's calls, Cruz's, a fighter dying on the far side of the line where it had been assigned, and Ray going no further than he'd been asked. Nobody could have faulted him.

“Well,” said Cruz on the common channel, very dry. “He's learned to knock.”

Then Kate's voice again, lightly, the way she'd said you can breathe at the tanker.

“Professor, does your lead ever arrive late for anything?”

Baxter opened his mouth to answer. Cruz got there first.

“No,” said Cruz.

That was all he said. It wasn't a joke, and it wasn't quite an answer to her question. Baxter heard the silence afterward, and he heard Kate hear it, and he knew that she had noticed. Kate noticed everything about her own flight. It was one of the reasons they would have followed her into the sea.

And knowing Kate, he thought, she had already worked out exactly what Cruz's silence meant, and got it completely wrong. She would decide Victor disapproved of Joker One. She would probably have words with him about professional courtesy between flights. Baxter found, rather to his own surprise, that he was smiling inside his mask, in the middle of an assault on a defended airfield, and made himself stop.

He didn't hear what she said next on Queen's own channel. He had his own problem. A pair of Su-25s had come down the northern valley behind Ray's departure, low over the river, and one of them was turning toward Halloran's line while the other went for the Humvee column forming up beyond the bend.

He couldn't have both.

He looked at the helicopters, and at the column, and at Coster and Tasha off to his left, and made his choice.

“Four, the one on the helicopters, it's yours. Three, stay with Four. I'm taking the column.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

He took the Frogfoot over the column with a missile, cleanly, and saw Coster's go down beyond the helicopters a moment later, and Spread One went on up the valley with nothing touching it. It was a small thing. Nobody would remember it. But Baxter had made the call and it had been the right one, and for a few seconds he let himself have that.

Coster heard FLAMMA before he saw him.

A new voice on the open channel, Sotoan, young and quick and amused. He was talking to somebody, or to nobody, or perhaps just to the sky: telling it he was coming, telling it what he was going to do to the helicopters in the south. Then Dealer came over the top of him, sharper than Coster had ever heard him.

“Single bandit, high, very fast, out of the north. MiG-31. It's an ace. FLAMMA. He's diving on Spread Two.”

Coster looked south. He couldn't see the MiG. He could see the line of helicopters far away over the southern route, small as gnats, and above them the four specks of Queen, and he knew at once that he was too far away to do anything at all. He turned anyway. Everybody did.

Then he saw the MiG: a long dark shape coming down out of the high cold sky at a speed that didn't look survivable, nose down, straight for the helicopters. He'd heard about pilots like that. Interceptor pilots, made for one thing, going straight in and straight out, too fast to catch. The kind of pilot who would have given Ray exactly the fight Ray had found at White Valley. The kind he'd liked.

Ray was already there.

He came across the MiG's dive from below and to the side, at the one angle that gave a fast aircraft nothing to do but keep going, and there was no turning fight, no circling, no moment where anybody watched to see what anybody else would do. FLAMMA saw him at the last second and tried to pull out. He was good. Coster would give him that. He was very good.

One burst.

The MiG came apart in the air a mile and a half short of the helicopters and fell, burning, into a field on the valley floor that was already black. One of the launchers Ray had killed half an hour earlier had gone up there, and the grass had burned off around it, and there was nothing in that field now but scorched ground and the wreck of the launcher. Nothing left to hurt.

The open channel went quiet.

Coster flew back to his own valley slowly and thought about it.

He thought about the MiGs Ray had killed today, and the Frogfoots, and the launchers on the slopes, and where every one of them had come down. The scree. The river. The burned field. Open ground, every time. Not one near a road, a vehicle, a helicopter, a marked store. It wasn't luck. You couldn't be that lucky all afternoon. It was choosing. Choosing where each one would fall before it fell, and then killing it there.

He's not just good at killing, Coster thought. He's good at where.

He didn't know why that frightened him more than everything else he'd seen. Perhaps because it meant there was never a moment when Ray wasn't thinking about everything at once, every helicopter, every aircraft, every person on the ground, all the time, without rest. Perhaps because he couldn't imagine what it would be like to live inside a head like that.

He looked for Tasha and found her off his wing, exactly where she ought to be.

“You all right?” he said.

“Yes. Why?”

“No reason.”

“You've gone quiet.”

“I'm allowed to go quiet.”

“You never go quiet. You've been talking about track four since Christmas.”

“It isn't Christmas yet.”

“Exactly,” Tasha said, and Coster found, a little to his own surprise, that he felt better.

Baxter heard about FLAMMA from Dealer and saw the end of it from twelve miles away, a speck of fire falling into the southern valley, and he made himself think about it as he would have thought about an experiment.

White Valley: RAIA, three passes, a man taking his time.

Newfield: Darre, a turn and a half, and the jerk back.

The MiG-29 this afternoon. The same thing, and the same jerk, at the moment Kate's voice came on the net.

And now FLAMMA, who had been fast and good and confident and exactly the sort of opponent that seemed to draw something out of Ray that Baxter didn't have a name for, and Ray had killed him in one pass without the least hesitation because FLAMMA had been diving on Queen.

He only lets himself go, Baxter thought, when there's nobody he cares about anywhere near.

He couldn't decide whether that was the most reassuring thing he'd learned about Ray or the most frightening. He suspected, from long experience of data, that it was both, and that he was going to spend some time deciding which mattered more.

At 1652 both transport groups reached their deployment points, and the ground units began moving into the base.

From above, Drinwich looked like something on a model railway: the long runway in the valley floor, the hangars along it, the grey blocks of the magazines on the eastern side, the fuel bunkers to the north under their mounded earth. The Humvees came in from both ends in long lines, small and brave, and the Sotoans came out to meet them with everything they had left.

Ray took the air. That had been agreed, and he kept to it. Attack helicopters came up from behind the hangars and died. A pair of Su-25s came down the valley and died. Queen took the ones on their own side, and the line between them held. Baxter and Coster went to work on the ground.

It was slow, careful, frustrating work. There were tanks among the hangars and APCs behind the barracks and an anti-aircraft gun dug in beside the control tower, and every one of them was close to something Pike wanted back. Baxter went down to look before every attack. He called Lund before every pass. Where are your people. Can they move. Thirty seconds.

There was a Humvee pinned behind a low wall on the northern side of the field, close to the fuel bunkers, with an APC firing at it from two hundred yards away. Baxter could see the crew behind the wall, four of them, flat on the ground. He couldn't hit the APC without putting a missile within fifty yards of them.

“Lund, Joker Two. Your vehicle behind the wall by the north bunker. I need them to move left, toward the runway, fifty yards. Can they move?”

A pause. Then a new voice, close and breathless, a radio held too near somebody's mouth.

“Joker, this is Two-Six behind the wall. You want us to move toward the runway?”

“Fifty yards. Then get down again.”

“There's nothing there.”

“There will be in a minute. I need you out of the way of it.”

Another pause. Baxter watched four small figures get up from behind the wall and run, bent double, across fifty yards of open concrete, and throw themselves down again.

“Clear,” said Two-Six.

Baxter took the APC with one missile, from the side that put the wreckage against the wall and away from them. When the smoke cleared the four figures were still lying where he'd asked them to lie. One of them sat up and waved both arms over his head.

“Joker,” said Two-Six, “I would like to buy you a drink.”

“Join the queue,” said Halloran on the net, who had apparently been listening. “It goes round the block.”

Halloran's aircraft took its hits at 1658, putting her line down on the northern edge of the field.

It wasn't much. A burst of small-arms fire from somewhere in the barracks, a sound like gravel thrown at a tin roof, a warning light, and then a second warning light, and the aircraft's handling going from good to bad in the space of about four seconds. She put it down anyway, hard, on the grass beside the perimeter fence, with the others coming in around her, and held it there while the infantry came out of the back and ran.

When the last of them was out she sat with her hands on the controls and the rotors winding down and her heart going like a drum, and looked up.

The grey jet came round over the field in a long low turn. So low she could see the emblem on its tail, and the dark helmet in the cockpit. As it went over her line of helicopters the helmet turned toward them, and moved, slowly, along the line, from the first aircraft to the last.

She'd swear for the rest of her life that it was counting them.

Then it went on, toward the south end of the field, where Queen's helicopters were still coming in.

“Chief,” said Pruitt, after a while.

“Don't.”

“I was only going to say—”

“I know what you were going to say. Get out and look at the tail rotor.”

The attacker came out from behind the eastern hangars at 1704, a single Frogfoot low and fast and loaded, and it went straight for the nearest magazine.

Baxter saw it at once. He saw where it was going and he saw the line he'd have to take to get it, and he saw that the line ended with the Frogfoot coming down on the magazine roof with everything it was carrying. He didn't take the shot. He held it, which was the hardest thing he'd done all afternoon, and looked for another line.

There was one. If the Frogfoot was hit from the south, from slightly below, it would roll left as it went, and the roll would carry it over the magazine and into the empty ground beyond the perimeter fence. But it had to be hit from the south, and in the next fifteen seconds, and Baxter was in the wrong place.

“Joker One, attacker over the eastern magazines. Don't hit him from the north, he'll come down on the roof. Hit him from the south, low, and he'll roll clear over the fence. From the south.”

Two clicks.

The grey Hornet was already coming up from the south, low, on the line.

Baxter watched it. It was exactly the line he had described, so exactly that he could have laid a ruler along it, and the burst came, and the Frogfoot rolled left as it died, and went over the magazine roof with ten feet to spare, and came down in the empty ground beyond the fence in a long rolling cloud of fire with nothing around it.

He let his breath out.

Then he thought, quite clearly and without wanting to: he was already there.

He'd been on that line before Baxter had finished speaking. He might have been on it before Baxter had started. Baxter had been a teacher for a long time. He had stood in front of a great many students who already knew the answer, and some of them had let him give it to them anyway, out of kindness, because they could see that it mattered to him to be the one who said it. He had always been rather touched by that, and had never once been on the receiving end of it.

He didn't know if that was what had just happened. He never would. Ray had followed the line because it was a good line, and the Frogfoot was down, and the magazine was intact, and Baxter decided that was all he was entitled to know.

Below him, at the western end of the field, two transports were rolling for the runway, trying to get out before the Humvees reached them. Dealer called them as optional targets. Ray's Hornet went past them low and fast, close enough that they must have felt it, and didn't fire, and didn't turn back. The transports lifted off and went away west, over the mountains, and Ray let them go.

Baxter watched them out of sight. He found that he was glad.

The drones came up at 1711.

“Joker, Dealer. Contacts lifting off the field. Small. Four of them. Off the hardstanding behind the eastern hangars. They're—” A pause. “They're drones. Quadcopters. Heavy. Carrying something.”

On Joker's channel, nobody said anything for one long second. Then Coster said, very quietly, “Oh, you have got to be joking.”

Baxter looked. Four of them, squat and grey, rising slowly from behind the hangars with something slung under each belly. They rose in a ragged cluster, and he understood what they were for at about the same moment he saw where they were. They were close to the eastern magazines, very close, and climbing, and when they were high enough they would turn and go into the magazines and the fuel bunkers and everything Pike had said intact about, and Drinwich would go up in a fireball that would be seen from the coast.

The Sotoans couldn't hold the field. So nobody else would have it either.

And you couldn't hit them from the side. If you hit one from the flank it would tumble sideways, still loaded, into whatever it was next to. The only clean way was along the runway, straight down its length, so that whatever fell, fell on concrete.

“Joker One,” Baxter said. “Drones, behind the eastern hangars. Don't hit them from the side. Take them along the runway, west to east, so they fall on the concrete. Nowhere else.”

Ray was already at the western threshold.

He was lined up on the centreline so precisely that Baxter could have drawn it, low over the concrete, wheels up, coming east. The two small missiles that Jenkins had loaded at half past five that morning, on the word of a man who had said only drones, came off the outboard stations one after the other. The first took the lead drone nose-on as it cleared the hangar roofs, and the drone stopped climbing and dropped straight down onto the runway and lay there. The second took the next the same way.

Then the gun. The third drone was higher and beginning to tip toward the magazines when the burst reached it, and it went straight down, onto the concrete apron, a hundred yards short of the nearest store.

“Three down,” Tasha said. Her voice had gone strange and very calm. “Bax, there's a fourth. It's behind him. It went the other way.”

Baxter found it. The fourth drone hadn't followed the others. It had lifted from the far side of the hardstanding and was going west, low and slow, toward the fuel bunkers on the northern edge of the field. Toward the north bunker and the low wall where Two-Six and his crew were still lying flat.

And Ray was at the eastern end of the runway, going away from it, at the end of his pass.

Baxter opened his mouth. There wasn't time to say anything.

The grey Hornet rolled. It went over onto its back a hundred feet above the eastern threshold and pulled, and the nose came round and down and through, in a manoeuvre Baxter had never seen anyone fly that low and wasn't sure he'd have tried with an hour's notice and a simulator. Half a loop, inverted, a hundred feet over concrete, until the jet was coming back down the runway the wrong way, upside down, its nose pointed along the centreline at the fourth drone from the far end of the field.

It fired upside down. One burst.

The drone was over the edge of the runway. It should have fallen onto the grass beside it, toward the bunker. It didn't. The rounds took it from directly along the runway's line, and it tipped toward the concrete as it fell, away from the bunker, away from the wall, and hit the edge of the runway nose first and lay there.

Nothing exploded.

The grey Hornet rolled upright at the western end of the field and climbed away as though nothing at all had happened.

“Four down,” Tasha said. Then, after a moment, she keyed again, and her voice was very small. “Captain Lund, is the area safe?”

It was a long time before the ground commander answered. When he did, he sounded like a man who had been holding his breath.

“Drinwich secured,” he said. “All marked structures intact. Magazines, bunkers, hangars. All intact.” A pause. “Somebody tell your pilot I've never seen anything like that in my life.”

Nobody told him. Baxter thought, looking down at the four grey shapes lying on the concrete in the gathering dusk, that Ray had probably heard.

They came aboard after dark.

The recovery was heavy. Half the wing had flown over a field it wasn't allowed to bomb, and was coming home with the bombs still hanging under its wings, and Baxter, coming round in the pattern, could hear the landing signal officer working harder than he'd ever heard her work. One of the Harriers had jettisoned into the sea on the way back to get under weight. A Queen aircraft boltered, went round and came in again, sinking and nose-high, and caught the one wire with a noise Baxter felt in his teeth.

His own aircraft was heavy too. He'd used his missiles and most of his rounds, but he'd brought back both bombs, and the Hornet came over the round-down like an overloaded van.

Ray came aboard last. He always did.

Baxter was out of his own aircraft by then, standing by the island with his helmet under his arm, and he watched the grey Hornet come round the stern under the deck lights. It sat high on the approach, light and clean, without any of the sinking heaviness of the aircraft that had come in before it. He looked at the pylons as it went past. There was nothing on them. Not a bomb, not a missile, not a tank. It caught the three wire, which was the one you were meant to catch, and came to a stop as gently as if it had been set down by hand.

He waited by the ladder while Ray climbed out. The deck crew were already swarming the aircraft; Dutch was coming across from the island with his clipboard. Ray stood at the bottom of the ladder for a moment with his hand flat against the fuselage, as he often did, and then saw Baxter waiting and came over.

“Good work,” Baxter said.

Ray nodded.

“What do you need for the next sortie?”

“Ammunition.”

“I meant food,” Baxter said. “And sleep.”

Ray looked at him. Baxter held the look. He had found, over the last month, that this was more or less the only thing that worked: not asking twice, not explaining, just standing there with the question until Ray decided to pick it up.

“Those too,” Ray said.

It was the first time Baxter had heard him concede anything for himself. It was hardly anything. It was two words. Baxter would have given a great deal to know how long it had been since the last time.

“Galley's open,” he said. “Coster and Tasha will be in there already.”

They were. Coster had been slow off the deck, having been held up by the plane captain about a hydraulic leak, and by the time he got to the galley the line was long and Tasha was already at a table with two trays.

“That's not mine,” Coster said, when she pushed one across.

“I picked up two by mistake.”

“You picked up two.”

“By mistake. I wasn't paying attention. You can have it or I'll give it to Bax.”

Coster looked at the tray. It did have the potatoes he liked, and not the ones he didn't. He sat down without another word and began to eat.

Kate went up to the flight deck after the debrief because she couldn't sleep yet, and because she always went to look at the aircraft after a hard day. It was a habit she'd had since flight school, and she'd never been able to explain it to anyone. Cope had called it saying goodnight to the horses.

The deck was mostly dark, a few work lights on, the sea black and enormous beyond the edge. Most of the aircraft had already gone below. Joker One's Hornet was still up, wings folded, parked near the bow, and Dutch was finishing his walk-round with a torch. Tasha's dog was lying under the nose of it with his chin on his paws, the way Kate had once seen him lie outside the infirmary.

She didn't mean to go over. She found she had. The dog lifted his head as she came, looked at her, and put it down again, as though she were not the person he was waiting for, but would do to be going on with.

“Lieutenant Commander,” he said.

“Dutch.” She looked at the aircraft. In the torchlight she could see the pylons under the folded wings. All bare. Every one. “He came back clean.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“The rest of us came back like delivery vans.”

“Yes, ma'am. I heard the deck.” Dutch played the torch slowly along the underside of the wing, checking something she couldn't see. “He always does. Never brings anything back. Not since he came aboard.”

“Is that a problem?”

Dutch didn't answer at once. He was a careful man; she'd known him for two years, since he'd taken over Cope's aircraft, and she had never once heard him say anything he hadn't thought about first.

“No, ma'am,” he said. “Not a problem.” He put his hand flat on the side of the jet, the way she'd seen Ray do it. “Commander Cope used to bring half his load home. Every sortie. I'd ask him why, and he'd say, got to keep something for the way home, Dutch. Every time. Like a superstition.” The torch stopped moving. “This one doesn't keep anything for the way home, ma'am. Not ever. Not one round.”

Kate stood looking at the bare pylons for a long time.

She thought about the briefing room that afternoon, Pike saying drones and everyone looking puzzled except one man, who hadn't looked up at all. She thought about the tanker, three minutes of an aircraft holding so still behind her it might have been painted there, and a voice saying thank you, Queen One as if it were handling something that might break. She thought about moving. One word. He had been over the ridge before she'd finished her sentence. She thought about Cruz saying no on the common channel in that voice, and then nothing else, and how she had known at once that he was keeping something from her, and that Victor Cruz had never kept anything from her in his life.

She didn't know Ray. She had said so to Cruz, and to Everson, and to Nguyen, and to Tasha over cake, and she had meant it every time. She still meant it. She had never met him before White Valley and there was nothing to remember.

She found, standing on the dark deck looking at a jet with nothing left under its wings, that for the first time she wanted to.

For professional reasons. Obviously.

He was an operational problem. That was all. Joker's lead flew across other people's engagements and arrived before he was called and brought home nothing, not one round, and Queen had to fly beside that every day. It was her job, as Queen's lead, to understand it. A good lead understood every aircraft in her airspace. She would have wanted to understand the fuel management of any pilot who flew like that. She would have stood on a dark deck at ten o'clock at night looking at anyone's empty pylons.

The dog, under the nose of the jet, lifted his head and looked at her in a way she did not care for at all.

“It's curiosity,” Kate informed him. “Operational curiosity.”

The dog put his chin back on his paws.

She told herself so again on the way down the ladder, and again in the passageway, and again when she passed the door of Joker's berthing and didn't stop. Then she realised she had walked the length of a passageway she had no reason to be in, to pass a door she had no reason to pass, and stood very still for a moment in the red night lighting, and decided she was more tired than she'd thought, and went to bed.

The signals came in to Pike in the CDC a little after 2000.

The first was from the ground commander at Drinwich. DRINWICH SECURED. ALL MARKED STRUCTURES INTACT. MAGAZINES, FUEL BUNKERS, HANGARS, CONTROL COMPLEX UNDAMAGED. FRIENDLY CASUALTIES: NIL. Then, at the bottom, a line in no format Pike had ever seen in a military signal: TELL JOKER THANK YOU. TELL JOKER TWO THAT TWO-SIX IS STILL BUYING.

She read that one twice.

The second was from the Army's forward base, from a helicopter pilot, a chief warrant officer called Halloran, and it was addressed, irregularly and in defiance of every rule of military correspondence Pike had ever been taught, to JOKER 1, PERSONAL.

She read it before she passed it on. It was her ship.

NINETEEN YEARS I NEVER TRUSTED A FAST MOVER. YOU OWE ME A NEW OPINION. ALSO MY CREW CHIEF WANTS TO MARRY YOU. ALSO WHATEVER IS GOING ON WITH THREE AND FOUR, GOOD LUCK TO THEM. HALLORAN.

Pike stood at the plotting table for a moment. Then she found, to her own considerable surprise, that she was laughing, quietly, alone in the half-dark of the CDC with the screens glowing around her.

She had planned Redouble expecting to lose something. She had never told anyone that. She had written a version of the after-action report in her head before the operation launched, with spaces left for the numbers. She had told Snider's Top they would get Drinwich. She had not told them they would get it whole, because she had not believed it herself.

She sat down and wrote the report. It was short and factual, as her reports always were. Drinwich secured intact. Friendly casualties nil. An enemy ace destroyed before reaching the southern transports. Four drones destroyed without detonation. She hesitated over the fourth drone, of which the ground commander's account had been several paragraphs long, somewhat incoherent, and involved the words upside down more than once. In the end she wrote only that it had been destroyed by Joker 1 from the reciprocal direction, and left Command to draw its own conclusions.

Then she sat with the pen in her hand for a long time.

She thought about Santos's reports, three of them now, each one shorter than the last. Fit to fly. Not sleeping. Will not discuss. She thought about Jenkins's figures, the column for Joker One on its own. She thought about a young man in the passageway outside her office, stopping to let someone past and then watching until they had gone round the corner, as though he needed to know they'd got there. About the drones he had asked for at half past five in the morning, when nobody had said anything about drones.

She had the best pilot in the history of the Federation on her ship. She had an airfield, whole, that the Army had said could only be taken as a crater. She had a landing force alive that should have died off Theve, and eight helicopter crews tonight who had come home without losing a man.

She had a pilot who never brought anything back.

Under Remarks, she wrote a line, and looked at it for a long time, and didn't cross it out.

Joker 1 to be granted forty-eight hours' stand-down at the earliest operational opportunity. Not at his request.

She knew, even as she wrote it, that there would not be an earliest operational opportunity. There never was, in this war. And she knew that he would never ask.

She signed it anyway.