They had built the airstrip outside the walls – not so much because the Stronghold wasn’t big enough to hold it, but because the walls were so high, and a hazard to take-offs and landings. And they were only getting higher – Baxter could even now see guys up there at work, extending them up beyond their original twenty feet, due to current events. Also, the Pred needed a good 1,500 meters of hard runway to get off the ground safely. They’d decided not to mess around with it. The shed was there to securely house the drone, without having to haul the two-thousand-pound bird of prey in and out the gate all the time. They flew a lot of missions. The Emir was big on ISR – intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Basically, he wanted to know what was going on, at all times – everywhere. Baxter shrugged. The Emir – at first it had rankled to have to call Godane that. But he’d gotten over it. There probably wasn’t anyone still breathing air, this far into the post-Apocalpyse, who hadn’t made huge compromises to stay alive.
