Chapter 1: Objective Medina

The tent smelled like diesel and burnt coffee, and nobody had slept.

Lieutenant Megan Meyers stood at the back of the briefing tent with her flight helmet under one arm, watching Major Halvorsen trace a red line across the map with his finger. The line ran north from their staging area toward Karbala, crossed a stretch of open desert marked in yellow, and ended at a cluster of black squares labeled MEDINA DIV — ARM/MECH. Someone had taped the map to a sheet of plywood propped against two ammo crates, and the tape had come loose at one corner, so the whole thing curled slightly, like it wanted to close itself up and hide what it showed.

She’d been in-country eleven weeks. Long enough that the smell of the place — diesel, hot canvas, the same stale sourness of MRE coffee, brewed too many times off the same grounds— had stopped registering as strange and started registering as simply home, the way any place did if you stayed long enough and had nowhere else to be. Long enough that she’d stopped counting days until she noticed, three mornings ago, that she’d lost track somewhere around day sixty, and the losing of it had felt less like carelessness and more like surrender to a rhythm bigger than her own bookkeeping.

“Thirty-two aircraft,” Halvorsen said. “Deep strike, full regiment. We hit their armor before it hits our lead elements coming up Highway 9. V Corps wants the Medina broken before it can dig in around the city.”

Around her, pilots shifted on folding chairs, checking watches, running fingers down kneeboard cards already crowded with grease-pencil notes from a dozen briefings that had come before this one and hadn’t turned out to be the real thing. This one had a different weight to it. She could feel it in the room the way you could feel a change in barometric pressure before a storm broke — nothing you could point to, just a tightness behind the sternum that every pilot in the tent seemed to be carrying at once.

Chief Warrant Officer Danny Ruiz sat beside her empty chair, saving it, tapping a pen against his thigh in the rhythm he always fell into before a mission — three quick taps, pause, three more, like a code only the two of them had ever bothered to learn. She’d flown with him for eleven months, since the day she’d walked into her first unit as the only woman in a company of Apache pilots and found exactly one other person who hadn’t looked at her like she was a mistake somebody upstairs would eventually correct. Ruiz had looked at her like a crew chief looked at a new aircraft — with professional curiosity, and the assumption that she’d either fly well or she wouldn’t, and either way he’d know soon enough.