See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: Fireflies
The desert at altitude looked like nothing at all until it looked like everything.
Megan flew backseat, hands steady on the cyclic, watching the world through her monocle in shades of green that turned the ground into a shifting field of static — sand and scrub and the occasional skeletal shape of a bombed-out vehicle from some earlier stretch of this war. Ahead of her and slightly below, the formation stretched out further than she could track, running lights dark, thirty-two aircraft moving north in a loose staggered column.
Ruiz worked the targeting system in the front seat, his voice gone flat and professional, all the warmth of the briefing tent burned out of it now that they were forty feet off the deck doing a hundred and twenty knots toward a division of Iraqi armor that had almost certainly heard them coming.
“Contact, eleven o’clock, tank column.” Clipped, professional, nothing wasted. “Engaging.”
The Hellfire left the rail with a shudder that ran up through the airframe and into her spine — the aircraft losing weight all at once, lurching almost imperceptibly upward as four hundred pounds of missile left the wing. Somewhere in the dark ahead of them a shape that had been a T-72 became a flower of orange light.
Around her the sky filled with the same blossoming fire, thirty-one other aircraft doing the same math she was doing. For a moment it felt almost clean. A light show happening to shapes on a screen rather than to men who, an hour ago, had probably been sleeping in the same tanks now coming apart beneath them.
Then the ground began to answer, and the cleanness went out of it entirely.
Tracer fire came up in strings, lazy-looking until it wasn’t. A string of green light stitched past the canopy close enough that she felt it in her teeth, and she banked hard right on instinct, chasing the terrain, putting a low ridge between them and the gun that had almost had them. Ruiz swore, short and sharp, and somewhere behind them the ZSU-23 kept firing, walking its stream of fire across empty sky where they’d been a half-second before.
“Everybody’s getting it,” Ruiz said. “Whole division’s awake.”
Radio traffic stepped on itself, call signs overlapping, urgent and clipped. Megan held her line, held her altitude, told herself the only math that mattered was the math directly in front of her.
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