6“Turnabout is fair play,” she warned Colby as they stepped off the Sea King helicopter that had fetched them across the narrow Washington Channel to Anacostia.
She was wet, dirty, had lost her cover, and could only hope that the dry cleaner could deal with the damage done to her uniform—dress blues were hideously expensive. Her return to Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling was far more ignominious than she’d imagined possible. For over seventy years, HMX-1 had never had a flight failure or other accident. They had the best service record in the world—and she’d been on the flight that had just ruined it with their plunge into the Potomac. Forever after, from this moment on, the Marines Corps would always have to say, “Zero mission failures…except this one time when the new White House Military O
