Eric could almost feel the heat wafting off of Lyssa and barely managed to hide the smile he felt trying to burst through. This was one of the few things he missed about wetwork, the more relaxed environment of working with equals.

“Lyss,” he said, cutting into the burgeoning argument, “you’re my eyes and ears here on the base.”

He turned around. “I need someone here I trust, because if the brass is willing to bust out strategic weapons on our own territory, they’ll also be willing to drop those same assets on the heads of me and mine. If you get the slightest inkling that’s going to happen, I want you to pull any teams in the target zone out.”

Lyssa nodded slowly. “You think they’d do that?”

“You can bet that they’ll be dropping those things on civilians, Lyss,” Eric said seriously. “There’s no way to clear all affected areas . . . so yeah, I think they wouldn’t think twice about dropping one on one of ours.”

“Alright. You’ve got it,” Lyssa said determinedly. “I won’t let you down.”

“Nor will I, love,” Siobhan winked at him. “I want you back in one piece, after all. We have a tradition to uphold.”

Lyssa looked between them, confused. “What kind of tradition?”

“The clothing optional kind, sweety.” Siobhan patted her on the cheek. “If you’re good, you can join in.”

Eric just sighed and left while Lyssa was turning purple and choking on some choice words he’d not heard since boot.

Five large hangar doors slowly opened on magnetic bearings in the predawn air of the New Mexican desert. Behind them, being wheeled out slowly by powerful tugs, were ten AH-982 Cherokee ground support vehicles.

The Cherokees were an older platform that had been one of the first to be refitted with the CM technology after it was successfully tested on the Archangel fighters. Designed to fill the role of lofty earlier platforms such as the Huey and Blackhawk, while still giving the pilots a bit of a bite in the air, the Cherokees were as good a platform to launch his mission as Eric could have hoped for.

Unlike the heavy transport they’d flown in on, the Cherokees had limited cargo space. Enough for a squad, a couple of medics, and their supplies, but very little else. In exchange for giving up that added space, you got a heavily armored platform that could hit true hypersonic speeds, loiter around an LZ, and hammer the ground into paste if the situation called for it.

In other words . . . perfection.

They were just that, perfect, at what they did. Since the war ended there had been little use for the platforms and they’d been slowly retired in favor of other, more specialty designed systems. But Eric knew a lot of men who still considered the Cherokee to be the height of military design.

He hoped they were right.