Lightning lit up the night sky over the Philippine Sea and she wished they’d finished the mission hours earlier. Terrorist insurgents in the remote southern islands of the Philippines hadn’t shown their hand until the last possible moment before she had to turn the plane around while there was still enough fuel to make it back to base. Besides streaming live video to government troops on the ground, her crew got their location, captured excellent photos of their camp and transmitted them via satellite to be disseminated to the intel weenies who’d figure out what it all meant. They’d completed the mission; now she had to get her crew back to base. Alive. Thirteen souls, including herself. That awareness kept her from letting the monotonous drone of the four turbo-prop engines lull her into drifting off—into thinking about anything other than the flight... For some reason, the image of Drew as she’d driven off just before deployment had haunted her all day.
