“You’re hilarious,” said Patu.
“All I’m saying,” said Fatani, “is that if this is some kind of exam, it would’ve been nice to have known that ahead of time.”
“Has to be,” said Patu. “That’s why they didn’t let us sleep. They want to know if exhausted pilots flying with limited intel can pull off a HERC mission.”
“If that’s the case, they’re testing us as much as the HERC,” said Fatani.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mazer. “We do what we always do. We scoop up the target and we bring it home.”
The secretive nature of the operation didn’t bother Mazer. He was used to sporadic psychological tests like this; it went with the territory in special forces. Someone was always running you to the point of exhaustion and then denying you water and keeping you up for another twenty-four hours. Or they were messing with your head in some other way: isolating you, or dropping you in the middle of nowhere with a blindfold over your eyes and telling you to return to base using only your other senses. Compared to those tests, this surprise mission with the HERC was a cakewalk.
A message appeared on Mazer’s HUD.
“Hostile territory in three point four kilometers,” said Mazer.
A second later there was a flash and a boom to their right as a flare exploded not ten meters from the cockpit. Flares were used as surface-to-air missiles—or STAs—in war games. It was all show and no shrapnel, but it still startled everyone on board.
“Whoa!” said Reinhardt, pushing the stick forward and dipping the HERC into a stomach-churning descent.
“Hey!” said Patu, slamming back into her seat. “Easy on the dips.”
Mazer grabbed the window bar to his right and tried to keep his focus on the data on his HUD.
“I’d say we got bad intel,” said Reinhardt. “We’re in hostile territory already.” Two more explosions lit up the night sky, one on each side of the aircraft.
“Fatani!” shouted Mazer.
“I’m going, I’m going,” said Fatani.
A section of the floor beneath Fatani slid away, exposing the gunnery dome on the underside of the HERC. Fatani worked the joystick on his seat and lowered himself into the dome, seat and all. The thickly forested hills of the Hunua Ranges rushed beneath him, the treetops just visible in the darkness. Fatani made a final adjustment, and the top hook of his seat latched into the swivel mount, suspending him in place and giving him the ability to spin and maneuver in any direction. A small window on Mazer’s HUD showed him Fatani’s POV, and Mazer watched as the butt of the laser cannon slid into position and locked on to Fatani’s chest harness.
“Locked!” shouted Fatani.
“Acquiring targets,” said Mazer.
More of the dummy STAs were shooting off around them, and Fatani picked them out of the sky before the flares could explode.
“Brass is dropping some serious cash on this op,” said Reinhardt.
Mazer was thinking the same thing. These hills had long been the playground for SAS exercises, but Mazer had never heard of a team getting this much heat in a single war game.
Tracer fire arced into the sky from the northeast. The glowing paint pellets whizzed by the windshield, narrowly missing the HERC. Fatani was on the source a half second later, hitting the tracer gun with the cannon’s laser, rendering the ground gun inoperable. Mazer saw the other three tracer guns on his HUD just before their arcing fire erupted upward. He blinked them as targets for Fatani, and the chair in the gunnery box spun and swiveled at a sickening pace as Fatani clicked off several more shots. Reinhardt dipped lower, weaving right and left to avoid the tracers—flying only a few meters above the tree line.
“Let’s not forget I’m down here,” said Fatani. “These pines will take my boots off if you go any lower.”
“Relax,” said Reinhardt. “If we hit a tree, you’d be a human bag of jelly so fast, you wouldn’t feel a thing.”
For three more kilometers they dipped and maneuvered and took out tracers and STAs. Patu kept swearing at Reinhardt for bobbing them around so violently and nearly getting them all killed. Mazer was beginning to agree; the motion-sickness pills could only do so much.
Then the HERC crested a hill and they saw it—there in a treeless valley—not a scrapyard vehicle pretending to be a Copperhead tank, but an actual Copperhead. Stranger still, it was taking heavy fire from the tree line to the north.
Patu and Fatani responded without hesitation, laying down cover fire into the trees. The lasers were harmless, nothing more than a game of tag, but everyone took the exercise as seriously as real combat.