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“Holy shit!” Punky shouted. She felt the impact through her seat frame and glanced over her shoulder at the four new holes that had appeared in the plane’s fuselage just behind her.

“Say again, Three November Alpha?”

Punky gripped the stick and squeezed. “I’m taking fire!”

“From where?”

She had the throttle pushed forward to the stop and was straining the motor to its limits, but if she had any chance of surviving, she needed to get away from the muzzle flashes on the ridge. Scanning the ground ahead of her, Punky looked for a flat piece of land where she could put the plane down if one of the bullets had managed to find a critical component.

Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!

The sickening sound turned her stomach, and she slapped the stick over to her left leg to counter the almost immediate roll to the right.

“What the…”

Punky dropped her hand from the throttle to the stick as the airplane fought her, and she struggled to keep her wings level. The Carbon Cub tottered on its axis, wobbling like a drunk sailor as it yawed into the damaged wing. She added left rudder to keep the nose tracking straight and hazarded a glance through the side window.

“Oh, shit.”

Through the green-tinted night vision, Punky saw a ragged strip of fabric fluttering on the outermost portion of her wing.

“Three November Alpha?” The helicopter pilot’s concern was evident in his voice.

“I think he got me,” she replied through gritted teeth. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end as she fought to regain the composure she expected of herself in stressful situations. But regardless of her previous experiences, nothing could have prepared her for the multitude of emotions that descended on her as she limped away in an experimental airplane from an invisible gunman below.

“Say your intentions,” the helicopter pilot said.

She had her hands full and fell back on her flight training, returning to the most basic of all aviation axioms: aviate, navigate, communicate. Before she could do anything else, she just needed to fly the damn plane.

“Three November Alpha?”

“I’m missing about two… maybe three feet of fabric from the top of my right wing. Aileron looks to be in good shape,” she said, talking through the damage in a calm, almost detached manner.

“How’s it flying?”

“Like a truck.” After the impact’s initial shock had worn off, Punky returned the Carbon Cub to a mostly stable attitude, but the damage she had sustained was making it difficult to keep her wings level. “It’s pulling hard right.”

“Copy. Can you make it to the airfield?”

She opened the window, letting it hinge upward against the wing, and craned her neck out into the slipstream to look back at the tail of the plane. Even at only sixty miles per hour, the wind blast took her breath away and almost knocked the night vision goggles free. Not seeing anything else that concerned her, she pulled her head back into the cockpit and scanned the ground in front of her for a suitable landing spot.

“Not with the way she’s flying,” she said.

She felt a shudder reverberate through the plane. When she pushed the stick forward, it got worse.

Fuck. Not good.

“Okay. What do you want to do?”

She leaned back into her seat and tried to ignore the sour feeling in her stomach. “I’m setting up for an off-field landing,” she said.

It was a fancy way of saying she was going to crash.

Raptor 24

Navy MH-60R

Brian had no trouble spotting the experimental taildragger as it cruised above them heading west. He had even less trouble spotting the muzzle flashes from just below the ridgeline. He saw the gunfire, but his brain struggled to accept something like that could happen off the coast of California.

“Say again, Three November Alpha?” He banked right, tracking the airplane’s movement to the north, then switched over to the intercom. “Rose, get on the fifty. Port side.”

“I’m on it,” Rose said.

The woman pilot’s voice sounded shaken and almost incredulous. “I’m taking fire!”

“From where?” he asked, though he was almost certain he already had a bead on the point of origin. “Anything, Rose?”

The aircrewman shouted from the back to be heard over the wind noise. “Nothing yet!”

“Three November Alpha?”

“I think he got me.”

He focused all his attention on the rising terrain in front of him, keeping the Seahawk close to the ground as he tracked closer to the stricken plane. It looked like the taildragger was making a turn back to the east, but he knew there were no runways on that end of the island.

Maybe she plans on bugging out back to the mainland, he thought.

“Say your intentions,” he said.

He had always been taught to stay out of another pilot’s cockpit in an emergency unless invited in, but he needed to know what she planned on doing if he was going to give her the appropriate support. When she remained silent, he knew she had her hands full.

“Three November Alpha?”