5
High over the Bering Sea, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Whitmore circled his MQ-25 Stingray refueling drone. M for multi-mission, Q for unmanned, and he tried not to give a s**t that no matter what you called it, the Stingray was just a f*****g drone. It was hard. Sure, the eggheads preferred UAV—unmanned aerial vehicle—but he wasn’t an egghead; he was a pilot.
Or he had been. And that was the hardest part.
Not making the astronaut corps, he could deal with that. It had always been a major dream, but he knew the odds sucked with the thousands who applied. But being permanently grounded after seventeen years and thirty-seven days in the jets made flying a UAV just plain gross. Still, it was better than flying some damn desk.
Accepting that it was a drone and doing nothing to defend it to
