Chapter 1
Captain Tanner "Bronco" Bennett gripped the cargo plane's stick and flew through hell, the underworld having risen to fire the night sky.
"Anything. Anywhere. Anytime," he chanted the combat mantra through locked teeth.
His C-17 squadron motto had gone into overtime today.
Neon-green tracer rounds arced over the jet's nose. Sweat sealed Tanner's helmet to his head. Adrenaline burned over him with more heat than any missile. He plowed ahead, chanted. Prayed.
Antiaircraft fire exploded into puffs of black smoke that momentarily masked the moon. The haze dispersed, leaving lethal flak glinting in the inky air. Shrapnel sprinkled the plane, tink tink, tinking like hail on a tin roof.
Still, he flew, making no move for evasion or defense.
"Steady. Steady." He held his unwavering course, had to until the last paratrooper egressed out of the C-17 into the Eastern European forest below.
Off-loading those troopers into the drop zone was critical. Once they secured the nearby Sentavo airfield, supplies could be flown into the war-torn country by morning. Starving villagers burned out of their homes by renegade rebels needed relief. Now. The scattered uprisings of the prior summer had heated into an all-out civil war as the year's end approached.
Anything. Anywhere. Anytime. Tanner embraced it as more than a squadron motto. Those villagers might be just a mass of faceless humanity to other pilots, but to him each scared, hungry refugee had the same face—the face of his sister.
A flaming ball whipped past his windscreen.
Reality intruded explosively a few feet away. Near miss. Closer than the last. Time to haul out.
"Tag—" Tanner called over the headset to the load-master "—step it up back there. We gotta maneuver out of this crap. In case you haven't noticed, old man, they're shooting at us."
"Got it, Bronco," the loadmaster growled. "Our guys are piling out of this flying coffin as fast as they can."
"Start pushing. Just get 'em the hell off my airplane so we can maneuver." Urgency pulsed through Tanner, buzzed through the cockpit.
His hand clenched around the stick. No steering yoke for this new sleek cargo plane. And it damned well needed to perform up to its state of the art standards today.
He darted a glance at the sweat-soaked aircraft commander beside him. "Hey, Lancelot, how's it look left? Is there a way out on your side?"
Major Lance "Lancelot" Sinclair twisted in his seat toward the window, then pivoted back. A foreboding scowl creased the perspiration filming his too-perfect features. "Bronco, my man, we can't go left. It's a wall of flames. What's it like on your side?"
Tanner leaned forward, peering at the stars beyond the side window for a hole in the sparking bursts. Bad. But not impossible. "Fairly clear over here. Scattered fire. Isolated pockets I can see to weave through."
"Roger that, you've got the jet."
"Roger, I have the jet." He gave the stick a barely perceptible shake to indicate his control of the aircraft. Not that he'd ever lost control. Lance hadn't been up to speed for weeks, a fact that left Tanner more often than not running the missions, regardless of his copilot status. "Tag, waiting for your all-clear call."
"You got it, big guy." Tag's voice crackled over the headset. "Everybody's off. The door's closing… Clear to turn."
Anticipation cranked Tanner's adrenaline up another notch. "Hold on to your flight pay, boys, we're breaking right."
He yanked the stick, simultaneously ramming the rudder pedal with his boot. The aircraft banked, hard and fast.
Gravity punched him. G-forces anchored him to his seat, pulled, strained, as he threaded the lumbering aircraft through exploding volleys in the starlit sky.
Pull back, adjust, weave right. Almost there.
A familiar numbing sensation melted down his back like an ice cube. Ignore it. Focus and fly.
Debris rattled, sliding sideways. His checklist thunked to the floor. Lance's cookies, airmailed from his wife, skittered across the glowing control panel. Tanner dipped the nose, embers streaming past outside.
The chilling tingle in his back detonated into white-hot pain. His torso screamed for release from the five-point harness. The vise-like constraints had never been adequate to accommodate his height or bulk. Who would have thought a simple pinched nerve just below his shoulder could bring him down faster than a missile?
Doc O'Connell had even grounded him for it once before. He knew she would again in a heartbeat. If he let her.