True Faith and Allegiance

She glanced at it and said, “I remember learning at Fort Rucker that each flight hour of the Apache, even if we’re just hanging out like this, costs thirty grand.”

Oakley said, “Thirty-two thousand, five hundred fifty dollars, ma’am.”

She laughed over her mic. “Then this is an expensive sightseeing flight.”

“If you see any sights, do let me know. Just looks like undulating dirt as far as the eye can see.”

The captain replied, “Don’t worry. At the rate things are going, the fighting will be in Mosul in another month. My guess is we’ll have plenty to see there.”

“Yeah, like SAMs corkscrewing right up at us. I imagine that will be a lively time for us both.”

“And then when we win,” she said, “we just hand the city over to the Iraqi government.”

“Do you want it, ma’am?”

“Ha, no, thanks. I just mean I bet the Iraqis will run it like crooks.”

Oakley chuckled into his mic. “If history is any guide, yes. But good ol’ corruption like you see in the rest of the world, around here anyway, is a major step up from the current conditions.”

Carrie Ann Davenport replied, “Roger that. Stealing money from the state coffer is a shit thing to do, but the local government is choppin’ off people’s heads now. We aren’t helping to turn the place into a bastion of truth and justice, but we are making it a little better, I guess.”

The young woman had become something of a cynic regarding the fighting here. She had no illusions Iraq would turn into a democratic nation, but she certainly did see the logic in uprooting ISIS as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And there was something else she was feeling today. The excitement of going home. This was her last flight before two weeks’ leave, and while she would spend roughly thirty percent of her leave either getting home or traveling back to Iraq, she’d have more than a week of family, friends, and whatever the hell she wanted to do, wear, eat, drink, or say.

After three months of life at a forward operating base, she couldn’t wait.

Carrie Ann spoke through the intercom. “I don’t know about you, Oak, I’m kinda looking forward to getting a little break from flying these unfriendly skies.”

“Just thinking the same thing. Seventy-two hours from now I’m going to be in my backyard with a beer, two kids crawling all over me, and a wife who isn’t sick of me being home just yet. That’s as close to paradise as it gets for an old dude like me. How ’bout you? Any big plans for your leave, ma’am?”

The undulating landscape raced by below at seventy-five knots while Oakley and Davenport both thought about home.

“I’ll just hang out in Cleveland most of the time with my folks, but I’m going to D.C. for the weekend to see some friends and go to a party. Should be fun. And then, just about the time I finally get the smell of JP8 out of my skin, I’ll turn around and head back here.”

Oak said, “I’ve got to build a swing set. And according to Carla, the kids already took some of the pieces out of the box the thing came in, so you can guaran-damn-tee I’ll be scrounging through my junk drawer to find—”

Just then their headsets came alive. It was the JOC, the Joint Operations Center, far behind the action back in Turkey. The call was a TIC alert, which meant troops were in contact, and then a set of coordinates. The tasking officer spoke to Pyro flight directly.

“Pyro One-One, how copy?”

“Solid copy,” said Davenport.

“We are going to hold One-Two where it is and send you to this grid. We got a call from YPJ. It’s a small unit of them pinned down by multiple snipers. That’s pretty much all we know. There is no JTAC embedded with them, so you’ll just have to evaluate the situation from above and see if you can intercede without endangering friendlies.”

Nobody liked flying into an unknown area without contact with friendlies on the ground. Carrie acknowledged the order and Oakley turned toward the location, already saved on his screen.

The captain said, “Great. Any idea what YPJ look like? I mean, I’ve seen their flag, but can you tell them apart at one hundred knots and five kilometers away?”

“Not really,” Oak confirmed.

* * *

As they approached the town from the north, they raced over the front lines of the YPJ on the north side of a wide culvert, flying at five thousand feet. Carrie Ann knew the sniper positions were somewhere a mile to the south, right inside a very congested-looking conglomeration of broken buildings that had once been a small town. She slaved the thirty-millimeter cannon to her right eye for now. With friendlies down in the area, she probably wouldn’t use rockets, and her load-out of six Hellfires meant she’d have to be choosy about using a missile on an individual with a rifle, although she wouldn’t hesitate to do so as long as there were TICs, or troops-in-contact.