INTERLUDE: 2010
“Alright boys, don’t make me pull over.”
Goldman snorted. “Hey, he started it, Major.”
Lilli shook her head and amped the tunes. She liked some Rancid when she flew a mission. This was a big one, bringing her squad into a firefight, already engaged. Lilli was flying in a backup squad, called in when the estimates for enemy combatants on the scene had turned out to be grossly miscalculated. The mission was serious and deadly, but the atmosphere in the cabin was not. Everybody knew they were headed into fire and might not come back. The adrenaline in the cabin was so thick it had smell and taste. The troops were giddy with it and acting goofy. That was just how things worked. When danger was looming, soldiers often got rowdy. They’d be plenty serious when they were in the thick of it. Now, though, the gunners, pilots, and crew chief were the only ones fully down to business.
It wasn’t her squad, not entirely—or at least not completely, not the way she thought of it; injuries on another squad and a couple of troops rotating out recently had shuffled the squad rosters. Three of the men she thought of as hers were on the ground now, engaged in the firefight already: Miller, Okada, and Scarpone.
Actually, she thought of them all as hers, her family, almost everyone on base. But she had become very close with the men who flew with her consistently, and things felt fractured since the roster shift.
She had a brand new co-pilot, too. Captain Mendez, with whom she’d flown for two rotations, had taken his out and gone home. Now she had a shiny new Chief Warrant Officer at her right, Bill Newell, fresh out of training and looking terrified. Everything felt slightly off for Lilli, but she shoved her unsettled feeling aside and focused.
“Your music SUCKS, sir!” Lopez yelled over the lyrics to “Time Bomb” and the roar of the rotors. Her guys knew she hated “ma’am”; they all called her “sir.” It had at first raised some eyebrows with Command, but it was an approved term of address.
She laughed. “Fuck you, Lopez. Fine—you wanna pick, be my guest.”
His eyes went wide; she never turned over control of the tunage. “I need me some Angus!”
“Christ, you’re such a cliché.” She rolled her eyes and put “Highway to Hell” up instead. The men all reacted favorably, hooting and shouting. No class, no taste.
Just then, the cyclic got gummy, and Donna shimmied hard, rolling slightly to the left. What the fuck? The men shouted their surprise, and in her periphery, she saw Lopez give her a look of sharp concern. Newell looked shocked. Great. Fucking noob.
“We’re cool, boys. Donna just got some gum on her shoe.” But it happened again, and this time the copter tipped more violently. A copter wasn’t a plane. Off its axis, it didn’t roll and resettle. It crashed. Period.
Lilli was calm. She was not someone who panicked. “Mr. Newell, take your cyclic. You clear?”
The kid swallowed hard and put his hands around the stick. What skin Lilli could see on him was running sweat, and Lilli was fair certain it was flop sweat, not heat sweat. God DAMMIT. The kid was going to choke. She turned off the tunes.
“Hey, be cool, Newell. Just need to know if you’re feeling a fight in the cyclic, too. If you’re not, you’re going to take over, but we’re all right here with you.”
Newell maneuvered, and Donna rocked hard, losing noticeable altitude. Now the cabin was quiet but for the sounds of the engine. Everybody was paying attention to what was going on up front.
“Was that you or Donna dancing, bud?”
“I—I don’t know, ma’am. Sir. I think I feel something.”
Lilli carefully reached over and manipulated the co-pilot cyclic. She felt the same catch. It wasn’t the stick, then, it was something deeper. In the engine itself. Donna wasn’t taking anyone to the front today. She called it in.
The response from Command was terse and direct. “Negative. Squad on the ground is overrun. Get those troops forward, Major.”
She had fourteen men on her ride. She gave it another couple of tries, but Big Donna was getting angrier every time. She barely reclaimed control the last time, and a few of the men actually screamed as the rotors skipped and the engine coughed. “No can do, Colonel. Donna won’t fly. Putting her down.”
“That’s a NEGATIVE, Major. Those troops are needed now!”
She knew full well they were needed. She knew full well what they would all likely lose by not carrying out her mission. But her mission had already failed, and she wouldn’t risk these men, too. “Sorry, sir. Mechanical failure. Putting her down. Need new transport.”
~oOo~
Within ten minutes, another copter was on the scene, but they were too late. The squad on the ground was wiped out. All of them—Okada, Scarpone, Miller, and the rest, KIA.
Lilli had disobeyed a direct order. She’d done it to save her squad, but she was relieved of flight duty as soon as she hit camp, pending investigation. Captain Ray Hobson, the senior pilot but for Lilli, was put in charge of the investigation. Hobson had never stopped gunning for her—in fact, he’d recently gotten much worse. He’d been passed over for promotion to Major, a promotion Lilli had gotten below the zone. Hobson had one more go, next year. If he was passed over again, he’d be forced out of the service.
Lilli knew his being in charge of the investigation made things even dicier for her, but she didn’t care. She’d let a whole squad of men—friends of hers, brothers—die violently, their bodies desecrated. She’d done it to save another whole squad, but it didn’t ease the loss. And she’d lost more. She’d lost Colonel Corbett’s respect. She’d lost the respect of everyone on base. The men who’d been flying with her, most of them understood. But not all of them. Some had been livid that she hadn’t pushed on.
Everyone was questioned. She had no idea what the men with her had said; she had no intention of asking. For her part, she’d told the truth. She went easy on Newell, who’d been no help to her at all, but he was green. She’d been shaky on her first mission, too, and she hadn’t been headed to a firefight.
Lilli pushed her papers and waited for the investigation report. For the most part, she kept to herself. For the most part, everyone left her to herself.
The investigation turned up no mechanical faults. Nothing. The cyclic was smooth. Everything worked as it should. Lilli read the report three times and then went straight to Chief Pettijohn, who glared at her as she approached. He saluted, and then nodded curtly. “Ma’am.”
“Chief, is this right? No fight in the cyclic?”
“Checked it myself, Major. Donna’s healthy as a horse. No failure.” He turned back to his work.
Lilli didn’t know what to think. She knew there’d been a bad—a potentially catastrophic—failure. She’d never have landed and disobeyed an order otherwise. She knew it. But Chief was good. He was thorough. And he’d once been on her side.
Had she fucked up? Had she gotten men killed?