PART 1

The dust in Afghanistan doesn’t just sit on you; it invades you. It works its way into the seams of your boots, the creases of your knuckles, and the back of your throat until you taste it in your sleep. That night at Forward Operating Base Keating, the air tasted like diesel fumes and impending failure.

My name is Major Sarah West, though for the last three months, most people here just knew me as “West,” the grease-stained officer who kept the comms arrays from melting in the heat and occasionally turned a wrench on the generators. I kept my head down. I did my job. I didn’t wear a flight suit. I wore standard fatigues that were two shades too light from the relentless sun and permanently smelling of hydraulic fluid.

The base was on edge. You could feel it vibrating through the concrete floor of the tactical operations center (TOC). It was a small, ugly scattering of bunkers and HESCO barriers, clinging to a patch of desert that God had seemingly abandoned and the devil was currently trying to reclaim.

The doors to the TOC burst open, slamming against the reinforced wall.

The SEAL team stumbled in.

They didn’t walk; they poured in like a broken tide. These were Tier One operators—men built of iron and ego—but tonight, they looked mortal. Their gear was shredded. Dust coated their faces like funeral ash, cut only by the tracks of sweat and dried blood.

I was in the corner, rewiring a fried radio handset, trying to make myself invisible. It’s what I did. I watched.

Captain Miller, the SEAL commander, hit the central table with a fist that shook the maps. He was a mountain of a man, but he looked hollowed out. His eyes were wide, scanning the room not with fear, but with the frantic calculation of a man running out of options.

“Sitrep!” someone barked.

“We’re blown,” Miller rasped, his voice sounding like gravel in a mixer. “They’re regrouping at the ridge. Heavy armor. Mortars. We barely got out of the valley.” He looked at his men. One was leaning against the wall, sliding down slowly, clutching a thigh that was wrapped in a tourniquet so tight the skin was white. Another was just staring at the floor, his chest heaving, the thousand-yard stare already setting in.

“They’re coming,” Miller said, looking at the base commander. “And we are naked out there. We need air. Now.”

The base commander, a logistics officer who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, shook his head. “Fast movers are two hours out, Captain. The Apaches are grounded for maintenance. We have nothing.”

The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush lungs. Two hours. In a firefight, two hours is a lifetime. It’s the difference between a story you tell at a bar and a flag draped over a coffin. The enemy wasn’t going to wait. They had vehicles, they had numbers, and now, they had the momentum.

Miller looked around the room. The desperation was starting to crack his composure. He looked at the logistics guys, the intel analysts, the mechanics. He was looking for a miracle in a room full of support staff.

He straightened up, taking a breath that seemed to pull all the oxygen out of the room.

“Any combat pilots here?”

It was a stupid question. This was a forward supply point, not an air wing. We were the people who fixed trucks and counted beans. His men looked at the floor. The silence stretched, uncomfortable and sharp. A few of the operators shook their heads, eyes dropping. They knew. They were dead men walking.

I felt the pull in my chest. That familiar, electric hum that I hadn’t let myself feel in years. My heart didn’t speed up; it slowed down. The world sharpened. The noise of the radios, the distant thud of artillery, the heavy breathing of the wounded SEAL—it all faded into a dull background hum.

I put the radio handset down on the workbench. It made a soft clack against the metal.

The sound was small, but in that tomb of silence, it was a gunshot.

Heads turned. Eyes landed on me. The grease monkey in the corner. My hair was pulled back in a messy bun, strands escaping to stick to the sweat on my neck. My hands were black with carbon.

I stood up. My knees popped. I felt the weight of thirty pairs of eyes hitting me at once.

“I can fly,” I said.

My voice didn’t shake. It surprised even me. It was calm, flat, and absolute.

A few of the SEALs frowned. One of them, a guy with a bandage wrapped around his head, let out a short, sharp scoff. It wasn’t mean; it was just disbelief. Skepticism is a survival trait out here. You don’t trust the unknown.

Captain Miller turned his entire body toward me. He didn’t scoff. He studied me like I was a bomb he was trying to defuse. He looked at the grease on my uniform, the lack of a flight suit, the Air Force patch on my shoulder that had seen better days.

“You?” he asked. It wasn’t an insult. It was a challenge.

I held his gaze. I didn’t blink. “Me.”

“What do you fly?” His voice was low, testing.

“A-10 Thunderbolt,” I said.

The reaction was visceral. A ripple went through the room. The A-10. The Warthog. The Tank Killer. It wasn’t a sexy jet. It didn’t break the sound barrier. It was a flying gun with wings wrapped around it. It was ugly, slow, and loud. And to every grunt who had ever been pinned down by enemy fire, it was the most beautiful thing in the sky.

“Bull*,” the guy with the head bandage muttered. “She’s a wire-fixer.”

Miller ignored him. He took a step toward me. The desperation in his eyes was battling with hope. “You’re telling me you’re a Hog driver?”

“Qualified and current,” I lied about the ‘current’ part. I hadn’t logged a combat hour in eighteen months. But once you know the Hog, she never leaves you. She’s in your blood. “And I know you have a bird on the strip. Tail number 81-0964. She’s grounded for a hydraulic leak in the number two system, but the parts came in yesterday. I fixed her this morning.”

The room went dead silent again. This time, it wasn’t despair. It was calculation.

“You fixed it?” Miller asked.

“I’m the one who signed off the ticket,” I said. “She’s ugly, Captain, but she’ll fly. And she’s fully loaded. 30mm, Mavericks, and a full belt of hate.”

Miller looked at his 2IC, then back to me. “You realize what you’re saying. If you go up there and you freeze… if you can’t put rounds on target… my men die. All of them.”

“I know the stakes,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to. “And if I stay here, they die anyway. Your call, Captain.”

The tension in the room was a physical thing, a wire pulled so tight it hummed. Miller stared at me for three seconds. Three seconds that felt like three years. He was looking for the crack. He was looking for the bravado of a support pog trying to play hero.

He didn’t find it.

“Show me,” he said.

The room exploded into motion. It was chaos, but controlled chaos. The SEALs were moving, checking weapons, grabbing radios. The hopelessness was gone, replaced by a frantic, terrifying energy.

I walked past the skeptics. I walked past the guy with the head bandage. He looked at me, really looked at me, and muttered, “Better be real, lady.”

“It’s Major,” I said, not breaking stride.

We stepped out into the night. The desert cold hit us instantly, a sharp contrast to the stifling heat of the TOC. The wind was picking up, whipping sand against our faces.

And there she was.

Sitting on the edge of the short, cracked runway, bathed in the yellow glow of a single floodlight. The A-10 Thunderbolt II.

She looked like a beast sleeping. Her grey paint was chipped, scarred by sandstorms and neglect. The massive GAU-8 Avenger cannon protruded from her nose like a grim warning—seven barrels of rotating death. To anyone else, she was a relic. To me, she was Excalibur.

I didn’t stop to admire her. I walked straight to the ladder.

“Captain,” I said, turning back to Miller who was shadowing me. “Get your men on the comms. Frequency 124.5. Tell them to mark their targets with smoke. If they don’t mark it, I don’t shoot it. Close air support is a game of inches. I don’t want blue-on-blue.”

Miller nodded. The doubt was fading, replaced by the grim reality of the gamble he was taking. “What’s your callsign?”

I paused, hand on the cold metal of the ladder. It had been a long time since I used it. It felt heavy in my mouth.

“Valkyrie,” I said.

A few of the SEALs exchanged glances. Valkyrie. Chooser of the slain. It was a heavy handle. You didn’t give yourself a name like that; it was given to you, usually after you did something incredibly stupid or incredibly violent.

“Valkyrie,” Miller repeated. “Godspeed.”

I scrambled up the ladder. The cockpit smelled of old sweat, ozone, and metal. It was a smell I had missed more than I realized. I dropped into the ejection seat. It was hard, unforgiving. My hands moved before my brain told them to. Muscle memory took over.

Battery master. Click. The panel flickered to life, amber lights struggling against the gloom.
Inverter. Click.
Fuel pumps. Thunk, thunk, thunk.

I pulled on the helmet I had grabbed from the ready room. It wasn’t mine—it was a spare, slightly too big, smelling of someone else’s hair product. I cinched the chin strap tight.

“Come on, you old girl,” I whispered, patting the dash. “Don’t let me down.”

I hit the starter for the left engine.

Whine… whine…

It coughed. A puff of black smoke shot out the exhaust, visible in the perimeter lights. The SEALs on the ground stiffened.

Whine… ROAR.

The high-bypass turbofan caught, screaming into a steady, high-pitched whine that vibrated through the frame and straight into my spine. I started the right. It caught immediately. The beast was awake.

I looked down at the tarmac. The SEALs were watching. They looked small from up here. Vulnerable. They were waiting for me to fail. Waiting for the mechanic to realize she was out of her depth.

I flipped the radio switch.

“Tower, this is Valkyrie. Requesting immediate departure to the north. Combat sortie.”

The radio crackled. The tower controller sounded confused. “Valkyrie? We have no flight plan filed. Who is this?”

“This is the only air support you have,” I snapped. “Clear the runway or I’m taking it anyway.”

“Cleared… uh… cleared for takeoff, Valkyrie.”

I released the brakes. The A-10 lurched forward. She was heavy, laden with fuel and ordnance. The runway was short—too short for a fully loaded Hog in this heat. I didn’t care.

I slammed the throttles to the stops.

The engines howled. The frame rattled. We picked up speed. 60 knots. 80 knots. The end of the runway was rushing up fast. Too fast. The desert scrub beyond was a black void.

“Come on,” I gritted out, pulling back on the stick.

The nose wheel lifted. The main gear hung on for a split second longer, dragging through the dust, before the earth let go.

We were airborne.

I banked hard left, barely clearing the perimeter fence, the G-force pressing me into the seat. It felt like a giant hand crushing my chest, and it was the best feeling in the world.

I looked at my HUD (Heads-Up Display). Green glowing numbers danced before my eyes. Weapon systems coming online. Master Arm: ON. Gun: RATE HIGH.

I keyed the mic, switching to the SEAL frequency.

“Hammer Actual, this is Valkyrie. I am wheels up. Time on target: three mikes. Tell your boys to keep their heads down. Mama’s coming.”

Below me, the dark desert stretched out, hiding the ambush that was waiting to chew up those men. I checked my gun sights. The 30mm cannon had 1,150 rounds of depleted uranium and high-explosive incendiary mix.

The skepticism in the briefing room didn’t matter anymore. The grease on my uniform didn’t matter. The fact that I was a woman didn’t matter.

Up here, I wasn’t a mechanic. I wasn’t a Major.

I was death from above.

“Showtime,” I whispered.

PART 2

The night sky over Afghanistan is a deceptively peaceful thing. At three thousand feet, the stars are so bright they look like shattered glass spilled across velvet. But down below, in the jagged throat of the valley, the world was burning.

I pushed the throttle forward, feeling the A-10 shudder as it fought the thin air. The vibrations rattled my teeth. It wasn’t a smooth ride; the Warthog never is. It flies like a dump truck with wings, heavy and obstinate. But that’s why we love her. She doesn’t glide; she bullies the air into submission.

“Hammer Actual, Valkyrie is ten mikes out,” I radioed, my voice tight but steady. “Give me a sitrep.”

Static hissed in my ear, angry and jagged. Then, a voice broke through—younger than Miller’s, breathless, accompanied by the chaotic staccato of automatic gunfire in the background.

“Valkyrie! This is Hammer Two! We are taking heavy fire from the north and east ridges! We’re pinned! We have wounded! If you don’t get here now, there won’t be anyone left to talk to!”

That was Lieutenant Cross. I recognized the tone. It was the sound of a man watching his friends bleed out while realizing he couldn’t stop it.

“Calm down, Hammer Two,” I said. “I’m inbound. I need you to mark the friendly line. Pop smoke. Red smoke.”

“Copy! Popping red! Keep your eyes open, Valkyrie, they have heavy machine guns and RPGs!”

I banked the aircraft, dipping the left wing to look down into the abyss. The valley was a black scar in the moonlight, but now, it was flickering. Muzzle flashes sparkled like angry fireflies. Explosions bloomed in dull orange pulses.

And then, the red smoke.

It billowed up from a cluster of boulders near the valley floor, a blood-colored stain rising against the grey rocks. It was a desperate signal, a “Here we are, please don’t kill us” flare.

“Visual on the smoke, Hammer Two,” I confirmed. “I see you. Tally on the bad guys. Setting up for a run. Keep your heads down.”

I pulled the stick back, climbing slightly to get a better angle for the dive. My heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat that I forced into the background. This was the moment. The transition from mechanic to predator.

I wasn’t Sarah West anymore. I wasn’t the woman who fixed radios. I was the pilot of a thirty-thousand-pound flying gun.

I rolled the A-10 inverted, pulling the nose down toward the earth. The G-forces slammed me into the seat, grey-out teasing the edges of my vision. The ground rushed up to meet me—a chaotic tapestry of rock and fire.

My HUD lit up with symbology. The target reticle danced over a cluster of enemy technicals—pickup trucks with heavy machine guns mounted on the back—that were pouring fire into the SEALs’ position.

I lined them up.

“Cleared hot,” I whispered to myself.

I squeezed the trigger.

The aircraft stopped flying and started shaking. The GAU-8 Avenger doesn’t just fire; it consumes the atmosphere. The sound isn’t a bang; it’s a tearing of the fabric of reality. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT.

A three-second burst. That’s all it took.

Down below, the line of enemy trucks simply evaporated. The 30mm rounds, each the size of a milk bottle, hit with the force of a freight train. Dust, metal, and fire erupted in a straight line, churning the earth into a molten furrow.

I pulled up hard, the engines screaming in protest as I climbed away from the blast zone.

“Good effect on target,” I radioed, my breathing heavy.

For a second, there was silence on the radio. Then Cross’s voice came back, sounding stunned.

“Holy… Valkyrie, that was beautiful! Direct hit! They’re scattering!”

“I’m not done,” I said, banking for a second pass. “Don’t get comfortable.”

Inside the cockpit, the smell of cordite had seeped in, sharp and metallic. I checked my fuel. Good. Ammo. Plenty. But I knew the enemy wouldn’t stay scattered for long. These weren’t amateurs. They were hardened fighters, and they knew that an A-10 meant death, but it also meant they had a target.

“Hammer Two, shifting fire to the eastern ridge. I see mortar teams digging in.”

“Copy that, Valkyrie. Watch yourself—we’re seeing… wait… RPG! RPG!”

The warning came too late.

As I dove for the second run, a streak of white smoke corkscrewed up from the darkness. It wasn’t an RPG. It was faster. Smarter.

A MANPADS. A shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.

The cockpit screamed at me. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! “MISSILE LAUNCH. MISSILE LAUNCH.”

“Breaking left!” I shouted, yanking the stick hard over and stomping on the rudder.

I punched the flare button. Thump-thump-thump. Bright magnesium flares shot out from the tail, burning hotter than my engines to confuse the missile’s seeker head.

I watched in the rearview mirror as the smoke trail jinked, confused by the flares, and detonated a hundred yards off my tail. The shockwave swatted the A-10 like a giant hand. The aircraft lurched, metal groaning. My head slammed against the canopy glass.

“Valkyrie! You hit?” Cross shouted.

I wrestled the stick, fighting the turbulence. The Warthog is a tank, but even tanks have limits. The controls felt mushy for a second, then bit into the air again.

“I’m up! I’m up!” I gritted out, sweat stinging my eyes. “They brought toys to the party.”

My hands were shaking. Just a tremor. I clamped them harder on the throttle. Focus, West. Focus.

“That was a SA-7,” I said, my voice colder now. “Hammer Two, they are trying to box you in. That wasn’t a suppression team; that was a kill team. They knew you were coming.”

“Yeah, we figured that out!” Cross yelled back, the sound of gunfire intensifying around him. “We can’t move! They’ve got a heavy machine gun nest directly north, blocking our extraction route. If we pop our heads up, we lose them.”

I looked at the fuel gauge. I had maybe twenty minutes of station time before I had to head back or risk flaming out over the desert. Twenty minutes to dismantle an ambush that had been weeks in the planning.

“I see the nest,” I said. It was a fortified bunker dug into the cliff face, spewing tracer fire that swept the valley floor like a scythe. It was too deep for a strafing run to be effective from this angle. I’d have to come in low. Dangerously low.

“I’m going to dig them out,” I said. “But I need you to suppress the ridge. Keep their heads down so they don’t get a lucky shot on me.”

“Copy, Valkyrie. We’ll pour everything we’ve got. On your mark.”

I circled wide, dropping altitude until I was barely skimming the mountain peaks. The moonlight washed over the cockpit, ghostly and pale. I felt a strange sense of detachment. The fear was gone, replaced by a cold, mathematical precision.

I remembered the look on Miller’s face in the TOC. The doubt. “If you’re wrong, men die.”

I wasn’t wrong.

“Rolling in,” I announced.

I pushed the nose down. The dark shape of the mountain rushed past my canopy. I was flying into the teeth of the enemy guns.

Tracer rounds began to float up toward me—lazy yellow streaks that snapped past at supersonic speeds. Zip. Zip. Zip.

I heard a ping as a round struck the titanium bathtub that protected the cockpit. Then another. They had my range.

“Suppress! Suppress!” Cross screamed over the radio.

Below, the SEALs opened up. Thousands of rounds poured into the enemy positions, a desperate wall of lead meant to buy me a split second of hesitation from the enemy gunners.

It worked. The incoming fire slackened just enough.

I lined up the bunker. The crosshairs settled on the dark slit in the rock.

“Eat this,” I snarled.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT.

The gun roared, vibrating through my entire skeleton. The tracers from the cannon hammered the cliff face. Rock, concrete, and bodies disintegrated. The bunker didn’t just explode; it ceased to exist. A cloud of dust and pulverized stone billowed out, silencing the heavy gun.

I pulled up hard, engines whining, pulling 6Gs. My G-suit inflated, squeezing my legs to keep the blood in my brain. My vision tunneled.

“Target destroyed,” I gasped, leveling out at two thousand feet.

“Direct hit!” Cross sounded like he wanted to cry. “Corridor is opening! We have a window!”

“Take it!” I ordered. “Move your ass, Hammer! I’ll cover the rear.”

“Moving! Go! Go! Go!”

I watched on the thermal display as the small, white-hot dots of the SEALs began to leapfrog forward, moving through the gap I had just carved. They were running. Limping. Dragging each other. But they were moving.

But as I circled, scanning the darkness, I saw something that made my blood turn to ice.

To the south, on the main road leading into the valley, a convoy of headlights had just appeared. Reinforcements. fast-movers. Technicals and armored personnel carriers.

“Hammer Two, Valkyrie,” I said, my voice dropping an octave. “We have a problem. You have company coming from the south. A lot of it.”

“How close?”

“Too close. If they reach the choke point before you get to the extraction zone, you’re cut off.”

“We can’t move any faster! We’re carrying three wounded!”

I looked at the convoy. Then I looked at the SEALs. Then I looked at my fuel gauge.

“I’m going to stop them,” I said.

“Valkyrie, that’s a suicide run,” Cross said. “There’s no cover down there. You’ll be flying right down the throat of their convoy.”

“Get your men to the chopper, Lieutenant,” I said. “Let me worry about the flying.”

I banked the Hog hard, turning back toward the oncoming lights.

This wasn’t just about following orders anymore. This wasn’t about proving a point to the men back at the base.

I looked down at the grease stain on my glove. The same grease I’d wiped off a wrench three hours ago.

They had looked at me and seen a mechanic. A girl who fixed radios. A nobody.

Now, I was the only thing standing between thirty men and a massacre.

I armed the Maverick missiles.

“Let’s dance.”

PART 3

The desert floor was a blur of shadows and moonlight as I dove. The altimeter unwound frantically: 2,000 feet, 1,500, 1,000. I was committing the cardinal sin of Close Air Support—getting low and slow in the face of an armored column. But I had no choice. The convoy was moving fast, a snake of headlights winding through the canyon, intent on closing the trap around the SEALs.

“Valkyrie, pull up! You’re too low!” Cross’s voice crackled in my ear, panicked. He could see me. Or rather, he could see the silhouette of the Hog dropping like a stone toward the enemy.

“Negative, Hammer. I’m shutting the door,” I replied. My voice sounded strange to my own ears—distant, metallic.

I lined up the lead vehicle. It was an armored personnel carrier, big and ugly. If I took out the lead, the rest would bottle up in the narrow canyon pass. Classic ambush tactics. The only problem was, they knew I was coming.

The convoy erupted. Every gun they had turned skyward. It looked like a river of fire flowing up to meet me. Heavy machine gun tracers, small arms fire, and the terrifying whoosh of more RPGs.

I gritted my teeth, forcing my hand to stay steady on the stick. The cockpit was filled with the ping-ping-ping of bullets striking the armored tub. It sounded like hail on a tin roof, only this hail wanted to kill me. A warning light flashed red on my dash—hydraulic pressure dropping in the right wing. I ignored it.

“Locking…” I muttered. The Maverick missile seeker searched for a contrast. It found the hot engine of the lead APC. “Rifle!”

I thumbed the release. The missile roared off the rail, a streak of white fire that bridged the gap in a heartbeat.

BOOM.

The lead vehicle vanished in a fireball that lit up the canyon walls like noon. The explosion flipped the APC into the air, tossing it like a toy. The vehicles behind it slammed on their brakes, crashing into each other, blocking the road instantly.

“Strike one,” I breathed.

But I wasn’t clear yet. I had to pull out of the dive, right through the kill zone. I yanked the stick back, the Hog groaning under the stress.

As I climbed, something slammed into the fuselage with a force that knocked the wind out of me. The entire aircraft lurched sideways. The master caution alarm screamed—a piercing, relentless wail.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. ENGINE FIRE LEFT. ENGINE FIRE LEFT.

I looked out the canopy. The left engine was trailing a thick plume of black smoke and orange flame. They’d hit the turbine.

“I’m hit! I’m hit!” I shouted, instinctively reaching for the fire suppression handle. I pulled it. The extinguisher fired, choking the flames, but the engine spooled down, dead weight.

“Valkyrie! Talk to me!” Miller’s voice cut in from the base, tight with fear.

“Lost the left engine, Captain,” I said, my voice shaking now. “She’s heavy, but she’s flying. I’m still in the fight.”

“Return to base immediately, Major! That’s an order!” Miller barked.

I looked down. The convoy was stalled, but the troops were spilling out, setting up mortars to fire on the SEALs who were still exposed on the valley floor. If I left now, the SEALs would be hammered by indirect fire before the extraction chopper could land.

“Unable to comply, Hammer Actual,” I said. “Hostiles are deploying mortars. If I leave, your boys get pasted.”

“Sarah, don’t be a hero!” Miller yelled, using my first name. It jarred me.

“I’m not a hero, sir,” I whispered, banking the crippled aircraft back toward the fight. “I’m a pilot. And I have ammunition.”

The A-10 was sluggish now, fighting me every inch of the way. The controls were heavy without the hydraulic boost from the left engine. My arms burned. Sweat poured down my face, stinging my eyes. But the right engine was still screaming, singing its defiant song.

“Hammer Two, how far to the LZ?” I asked.

“Two mikes! We’re dragging the wounded! We can see the chopper coming in!” Cross yelled.

“I’m buying you two minutes,” I said. “But you better run.”

I didn’t have missiles left. I didn’t have the maneuverability for a steep dive. I had the gun. And I had gravity.

I lined up for a final run, not on the convoy, but on the mortar teams scrambling up the hillside. They were the immediate threat.

I pushed the nose down again. The ground rushed up fast, too fast. With one engine, pulling out of this dive was going to be a wrestle with physics.

The enemy saw the smoking, wounded bird coming back for more. They couldn’t believe it. I could see them freezing for a split second, looking up at the broken angel falling from the sky.

Then they opened fire.

I didn’t flinch. I held the reticle steady.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT.

The gun emptied. The last of the 30mm rounds chewed up the hillside, silencing the mortar teams in a cloud of dust and red mist.

I hauled back on the stick with both hands, screaming with the effort. “CLIMB! CLIMB, DAMMIT!”

The ground filled my windscreen. Rocks. Bushes. Fear.

The Hog shuddered. The stall warning horn blared—a low, buzzing panic. The right wing dipped, threatening to flip me over into the rocks. I kicked the rudder, fighting the spin.

We cleared the ridge by feet. I could have counted the pebbles.

As I leveled off, gasping for air, I saw it. The extraction helicopter—a darker shadow against the night—touching down in the dust cloud. The SEALs were scrambling aboard.

“Hammer Two is loading!” Cross shouted. “We are loading! Valkyrie, get out of there!”

“I’m watching you go,” I rasped.

I circled high and wide, nursing the limping aircraft. I watched as the last SEAL was pulled into the bay. I watched the helicopter lift off, banking away from the inferno I had created.

“Hammer Two is wheels up! We are clear! Valkyrie, you are a goddamn legend! Drinks are on me for the rest of your life!”

I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for an hour. A tear leaked out and tracked through the soot on my cheek.

“Copy, Hammer Two. Get home safe.”

The flight back was the longest of my life. The A-10 was vibrating badly. The right engine was overheating, working double time to carry the dead weight of the left. Every warning light that could be on, was on.

When I saw the runway lights of the FOB, they looked like the gates of heaven.

“Tower, Valkyrie is on final. Single engine. Hydraulic failure. No flaps. I’m coming in hot.”

“Cleared to land, Valkyrie. Emergency crews are rolling.”

I lined her up. She didn’t want to land; she wanted to fall. I fought her down, wrestling the stick until my muscles screamed. The wheels slammed into the concrete—hard. We bounced. I wrestled her straight, stomping on the brakes. The aircraft shuddered, skidded, and finally, miraculously, groaned to a halt at the very end of the strip.

Silence.

The engine wound down. The cockpit went dark.

I sat there for a long time, just listening to the ticking of the cooling metal. My hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t unclip my oxygen mask.

Then, I heard it. Cheering.

I popped the canopy. The cool desert air rushed in.

They were all there. The mechanics. The support staff. And standing right at the front, covered in dust and blood, were the SEALs. They had landed just moments before me.

I climbed down the ladder, my legs feeling like jelly. My feet hit the tarmac, and I almost collapsed.

Captain Miller was there instantly, catching me by the arm. He looked at me—really looked at me—washing away the image of the mechanic he had dismissed hours ago.

“Major,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.

“Did they make it?” I asked, my voice a croak.

“They all made it,” Miller said. “Because of you.”

Lieutenant Cross pushed through the crowd. He was limping, his face a mask of dried blood and dirt. He stopped in front of me. He didn’t say a word. He just ripped the Velcro patch off his shoulder—the SEAL trident patch—and slapped it onto the shoulder of my greasy, sweat-stained fatigues.

“You fly with us,” Cross said, his voice fierce. “Anytime. Anywhere.”

The circle of men, the toughest warriors on the planet, broke into applause. It wasn’t polite applause. It was a roar. A primal shout of respect for the warrior who had come from the shadows to save their lives.

I looked down at the patch on my shoulder. Then I looked back at the smoking, battered A-10 behind me. She was ugly. She was broken. She was beautiful.

I wiped the grease and tears from my face with the back of my hand.

“I just did my job,” I said softly.

But as I walked back toward the TOC, surrounded by my new brothers, I knew it was more than that. I wasn’t just Sarah West, the mechanic, anymore.

I was Valkyrie. And I had found my wings.