hand.
“Bypassed the secondary valve and clamped the feed,” he said. “It’ll hold pressure. Mostly. But the coating on the leading edges is peeling. That jet’s out there taking a sandblaster to the chin.”
I didn’t care about the coating. I cared about the report that Lieutenant Davies, the comms officer, brought in thirty seconds later. He was pale, the kind of pale that has nothing to do with fluorescent lights. The long‑range array had caught a radar bounce before the wind tore the dish off the roof. A heavy bomber, profile matching a Tupolev Tu‑160 Blackjack, was using the weather clutter to hide, coming in low and fast. Direct vector for the evacuation fleet — three transport ships, unarmed, loaded with over 4,000 personnel from the island bases. They were 200 miles east, wallowing in 60‑foot swells, blind and helpless.
The math was violently simple. 4,000 lives against
one pilot, one broken jet, and a suicide launch into a storm that no aircraft was built to fly in.
