Having agreed to do what they were asking, Serge now found himself stationed in Afghanistan with Jean-Paul. It had seemed innocent enough at first; a relatively innocuous, if distasteful task that he had completed with ease. But now all hell was breaking loose around them and Jean-Paul Merard was nowhere to be found. So Serge had gone searching for the other pilot on the large Allied base.

During his infrequent communications with his agency handler, he had been told again and again that a time may come when the other man, Jean-Paul, might try to leave the base, and that this would happen in tandem with some notable world events. He had not been told more than that in any of his cryptic briefing sessions, but if ever something had qualified as ‘notable world events’, it was the last two days.

He searched the base frantically, checking guard logs at each of the three main gates. His ward was not in the officer’s mess, or in their barracks. At last he headed to the briefing room where they had advanced tactical classes each day with the senior pilots. But as he walked over to the low prefabricated building he passed the fighter hangar.

Wait, was that, holy shit, that was Jean-Paul now, in a flight suit, heading to one of the planes. They weren’t scheduled to go up, and they certainly weren’t scheduled to go up without a pilot. Sergio broke into a run, heading to the guard post. Flashing his pilot’s ID just as Jean-Paul had, he called out to the other trainee.

“Jean-Paul, qu’est-ce qui se passe?” Jean-Paul did not turn around at first, but as the other trainee approached him, he stopped and turned to him.

The quad was wide open and flood lit at all times. It was surrounded by guards, and the airfield’s tower was just next to it, between the hangar and the nearby runway. While theoretically Jean-Paul could easily handle the base guards with his onboard weaponry, his short-range lasers and sonic punch would be useless against whatever was taking out the virus pods above. The base’s air defenses, meanwhile, were an active matrix, meaning that if the tower didn’t actively stop them, they would shoot any foreign object out of the sky. Which all meant that he needed the powerful jet fighter to take down whatever was up there, and he couldn’t take off if the tower had any reason not to allow him safe passage. So in the middle of the wide-open quad, he turned to his fellow trainee and smiled like an old friend.