Collateral Damage

As she headed for the hangar, her pager went off again. She snatched it from her belt. 47 damaged by small arms fire. Crew wounded. ETA 15 minutes.

Honor stopped walking, her heart doing a sickening roll in her chest. Then she chided herself and kept going.

It’s not him. Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.

Except, considering the nature of his job and the constant danger involved in every mission he flew, she knew it very well could.

With renewed urgency she hurried across base to the hangars and found three of her soldiers standing around drinking coffee, waiting for the damaged bird to arrive.

“Hi, ma’am,” Smithers, her master sergeant, said.

“Hey,” she said, accepting a coffee from him with a smile of thanks. Corporal Feinstein was beside him, and Private Ipman on the other. “Where’s Andrews?”

Smithers rolled his eyes. “Taking his sweet time getting his ass in gear, as usual.”

She made a mental note to talk to him about that. Again. “Any more word on what happened with the bird? What unit they’re with?” Anything to prepare them for what they could expect upon arrival.

He shook his head. “Command told us a few of the crew were wounded, that medics and fire are on the way, and that’s it. Not sure who they’re with, or if the damage is small arms fire or an RPG.”

“Well the good news is, they’re still able to fly her,” Honor said, taking a sip of blessedly hot coffee. She felt more awake already. “You guys ready to go to work?”

“We were born ready,” Ipman piped up from where he was readying equipment near the far wall.

Together the four of them walked out onto the tarmac and stood near the flight line, waiting for the wounded Chinook to arrive. Emergency vehicles began showing up on scene, base paramedics and firemen standing by to greet the incoming bird and her crew. The entire time Honor’s heart beat an erratic rhythm, unable to shake that deep-seated fear that it was Liam’s bird. It wasn’t a rational fear, since logically she knew SOAR had its own maintenance section and the chances of her crew being called in for one of their aircraft was almost zero.

That didn’t diminish the lingering unease, made even worse because of the extra helping of guilt on top of it. Being that they were no longer on speaking terms, she hadn’t even had the guts to contact him after the incident last March to see how he was doing.

He hadn’t contacted her either, of course, but she hadn’t expected him to after the way they’d left things. Nope. He’d made his feelings about her actions crystal clear on that terrible night over a year and a half ago. The crux of it was, he didn’t understand what it was like to be forced to make the impossible choice between the person you love and your family. He saw her as weak for her decision, thought she didn’t love him.

Even nineteen months later that still stung. If he thought those things, then he didn’t really know her at all.

Ipman had been over talking to some guys from another crew and returned with news. “It’s a forty-seven Foxtrot.”

An older, utility Chinook. Couldn’t be Liam then, she told herself. SOAR pretty much only flew Echo and Golf models now. She let out a breath of relief.

Glancing back, she noticed Andrews had shown up at last and was standing with Feinstein, looking half-asleep with his sandy-brown hair sticking up and his eyes bleary. Finally the unmistakable sound of approaching rotor blades carried over the noise of other aircraft readying for takeoff, shaking her out of her thoughts.

In the distance, backlit against the eastern horizon getting lighter by the minute, two UH-60 Black Hawks appeared like giant black insects in the sky. Behind them, the huge, hulking silhouette of a 47 came into view. A small plume of smoke trailed behind it.

The 60s landed farther north down the tarmac, leaving the area closest to the emergency crews for the 47F. The pilots settled her down on the tarmac and in the lights from the fire trucks and ambulances Honor got her first look at the damage it had sustained. Her soldiers stood next to her, all of them taking in the multiple large-caliber holes in the right side of the fuselage, streaking from the rear of the cockpit and continuing all the way up to the engine housing. The pilots began engine shutdown and the twin rotors began to slow.

Fire crews moved in immediately. The medical perso

Heart thudding in her ears over the sound of the engines in their cool-down cycle, Honor watched as the wounded pilot removed his helmet and felt an additional surge of relief when the light caught on his hair. Blond, not dark.

Definitely not Liam, even though she’d known it wouldn’t be. And both injured men were walking out, so that was a good sign.

She expelled the breath she’d been holding, waited while the fire crews rushed in to check the situation inside and others drained the fuel to avoid a possible fire if any of the lines had been damaged. When they reappeared a few minutes later and gave the all clear, she and her soldiers climbed inside to look around.

Smithers let out a low whistle as he swept the beam of his flashlight around the interior. Light from outside streamed through the many holes in the fuselage and there must have been a fire at some point because the crew had sprayed retardant all over the place. The smell of jet fuel hung thick in the air, from the crews draining the tank, but perhaps from damaged fuel lines as well.

“They were damn lucky to keep the bird in the air,” Smithers said.

Honor didn’t answer, already busy doing her own inspection of the cockpit. The beam of her flashlight landed on the co-pilot’s seat. She stared at the blood staining it, her mind flashing back to Liam and what he must have had seen and felt when his own bird had been hit last March. He’d stayed at the controls despite his wounds, managed to keep the Chinook in the air and save the lives of everyone on board—his crew, a platoon of SEAL Team Six operators, Honor’s former roommate Maya and her now husband Jackson, and the Secretary of Defense.

She hadn’t found out about Liam until his shot-up bird had arrived from Kandahar the day after rescuing Maya, Jackson and the SecDef from Rahim’s clutches. She’d been in the hangar with another crew working on a hydraulics problem when someone had told her he’d been wounded. The next sixteen hours had gone by in a blur until she’d seen Erin the next day and her friend had reassured her that he was okay, that she’d seen him at the hospital in Kandahar. That was it. No details, no mention of anything else.

SOAR didn’t mess around with OPSEC, and no amount of digging since had clued her in to what had happened.

Switching her focus to the situation at hand, Honor made note of the damage in the cockpit and mentally compiled a list of what needed to be done. They could replace the seat easily enough, but the rest of the repairs to the body would take days, if not weeks.

“God I hate cleaning up blood,” Andrews muttered from behind her. The muttering was nothing new. He made it clear that he hated deployment, hated Bagram even more, and seemed to hate his job most of the time. In this case though, she agreed with him.

“Part of the job, and that’s why they pay us the big bucks,” she said, but she agreed with him. Cleaning up the blood of someone you knew and cared about would be far worse though.

“Wonder who shot them up,” Smithers mused behind her. “Taliban, or that Rahim guy’s followers maybe?”