Flynn found himself grinning. “Just talking figuratively, Zee. Fear not, my camos retain their pristine nature, without any unsightly new brown blotches.”

That drew a quick laugh from the rest of Wizard One-One’s crew. There were five of them all told: Dykstra; his copilot, Captain Kate “Ghost” Kasper; their flight engineer, Staff Sergeant Bill Wade; Zalewski; and the other PJ, Technical Sergeant Mike Camarillo.

“Geez, Nick, if you’re gonna freak out, I might have to assign Wade to monitor you in between engine checks,” Dykstra joked. “It’ll give him something to do besides wail and gnash his teeth about his missing guns.”

“I am not wailing, sir,” the powerfully built flight engineer said in mock protest. “Just sitting here sobbing quietly.”

Before they’d lifted off from El Minya, an Egyptian Air Force training base in the Nile Valley, ground personnel had hurriedly removed the helicopter’s two door-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. Stripping the weapons and their mounts shaved off close to a thousand pounds of weight. Even with the HH-60W’s larger fuel tanks, every option to lighten its load and extend its range counted. This emergency search-and-rescue mission to a crash site in southern Libya was at the very outer edge of the helicopter’s capabilities—already requiring one midair refueling just to get them this far.

Up to five hours ago, the crew’s primary focus as part of the Sixty-Fourth Expeditionary Rescue Squadron had been on weeks-long joint training exercises with their Egyptian and other allied counterparts. That had changed the moment they received a flash transmission reporting the crash of a U.S. Air Force C-130J Super Hercules deep in the Sahara Desert, some miles from the nearest inhabited place, the Wath Oasis. Despite being nearly nine hundred miles away, they were the closest trained CSAR group. Parachuting in a team might have been faster, except that no one in their right mind wanted to drop a handful of rescuers into the unknown without a way to pull them out in a hurry if trouble erupted. So now the Jolly Green II and its specialist crew was en route to do what they could for any survivors from the aircraft that had gone down. Of course, as hours went by without radio contact from the crash site, it was looking less and less likely that anyone had made it out alive. But someone still had to go check.

Wizard One-One’s pilots, Dykstra and Kasper, were combat-tested veterans of several daring missions to extract wounded U.S. and allied personnel under fire and deep in hostile territory. Bill Wade was along to keep the helicopter’s engines, hydraulic systems, and other equipment operating smoothly during an extraordinarily long and grueling flight. And as pararescuemen, Zalewski and Camarillo were graduates of one of the toughest training programs in the entire U.S. military—nearly two years’ worth of rigorous courses covering emergency medicine, parachuting, mountaineering, combat diving, wilderness survival, tactics, helicopter operations, and half a dozen other valuable specializations. If there were injured survivors still trapped in the wreckage of the C-130J turboprop, their expertise would be crucial to extracting the wounded and getting them back to base alive.