“Is this your family, Captain?” the General asked, holding my Distinguished Flying Cross toward me. I looked past him at my father—once so proud, so loud, so certain I was a disappointment—now standing amid shattered glass and spilled bourbon with tears running down his face. For thirty years, he had mocked me in front of anyone willing to listen, but the answer I gave that General made the entire room fall completely silent.

The transit flight across the Atlantic took less than three hours at sub-orbital velocity. Supported by a specialized stealth KC-46 tanker over the Mediterranean, the Valkyrie topped off her tanks in complete radio silence under the velvet canopy of midnight.

I was flying alone. The cargo bay behind my cockpit had been stripped of its sensory pallets and refitted with four medical litters, emergency trauma gear, and an automated perimeter defense pod.

"Valkyrie One, this is Vanguard Control," Sterling’s voice reached me via encrypted quantum-satellite relay. "You are approaching the border of the hostile exclusion zone. Once you cross this line, you are entirely on your own. No search and rescue backup. No air support. If you are shot down, the United States will deny this mission ever took place."

"Copy, Vanguard. Crossing the line now."

I pushed the Valkyrie into a screaming vertical dive from ninety thousand feet, plummeting toward the jagged black mountains below like a falling spear.

At five thousand feet above the terrain, I leveled off. The landscape below was a maze of knife-edge ridges and razor-sharp gorges, illuminated only by the ghostly green luminescence of my synthetic-vision display.

The radar warning receiver remained silent. The Valkyrie’s metamaterial coating and active radar-cancellation skin were working perfectly. We were invisible to the enemy's long-range radar networks.

Suddenly, two crimson spikes erupted on my electronic warfare display.

"Alert! Low-band acquisition radar detected at twelve o'clock," the automated computer voice chimed in my ear.

The enemy had deployed mobile, optical-guided radar units on the ridgeline, guessing that any relief aircraft would attempt to use the valley floor. They didn't have a weapons lock yet, but they knew something was coming.

"Not today," I breathed.

I dropped the Valkyrie lower, skimming the belly of the aircraft barely seventy feet above the rushing waters of a mountain river. The sheer rock walls of the canyon rose like monolithic towers on either side of my wingtips, so close that the aircraft's slipstream tore the loose gravel from the cliffs.

Ahead, the canyon made an abrupt, ninety-degree right turn into a narrow crevasse that no computer-guided drone could navigate.

I didn't slow down. I tapped the manual thruster vectoring pedals, threw the airframe on its side, and threaded the needle through the stone jaws of the canyon at four hundred and fifty knots.