Chapter OneChief Warrant 3 Lola Maloney stared at the tactical display of the DAP Hawk helicopter Vengeance projected on the inside of her helmet visor. Against the pitch dark of night outside the windshield and the soft glow of console instruments, the display revealed the rough terrain of the southern Ukraine and her broken flight formation.
The commander always knows what to do.
She tried it again as a mantra, The commander always knows what to do.
Along with a thousand plus hours of officer training, none of it meant s**t at the moment—she didn’t have a goddamned clue what came next.
“Kara,” she called to the drone operator tucked three hundred miles away on the USS Peleliu helicopter carrier, though her drone was circling somewhere six miles above Vengeance. “You’re my eyes.”
“Ro
