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“Dammit,” he muttered. Gunny’s gonna get on me for that.

He wasn’t the poster Marine by any stretch, but he still made an effort to keep up appearances. If for no other reason than it allowed him to stay under the radar of the senior staff noncommissioned officer’s withering stare. He would do anything to breathe in fresh air on the roof with the chain monkeys, but instead his recruiter had doomed him to a life stuck indoors.

Battle to belong. My ass!

“Hey, Garett, Gunny’s looking for you.”

He looked up and saw his sergeant walking toward him. Unlike Adam, Sergeant Narvaez, a short and stocky Puerto Rican from the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, was the perfect Marine. His green coveralls were starched with sleeves rolled tight around his defined biceps and legs bloused neatly above his tan combat boots. Under other circumstances, he could have been the perfect role model.

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “I’m on my way.”

Narvaez brushed by him, and Adam turned the corner with trepidation. It wasn’t that he was afraid of working for the hard-nosed gunnery sergeant; it was that he woke every day dreading a life stuck with this job. Aviation Logistics Information Management Systems Specialist. It had sounded important when the recruiter pointed it out to him.

“Garett! Where da fuck have you been?”

He took a deep breath and ignored the gravelly voice as he walked through the door and took his seat at the computer that had become his rifle. Instead of storming the beaches of Iwo Jima or wading through the jungles of Guadalcanal, he was given charge of a broad spectrum of network infrastructure and information systems. You never saw that job on any of the recruiting posters.

“Sorry, Gunny,” he muttered.

“Sorry don’t cut it in my Marine Corps.” He always said it like that, as if he had been a wet-eared private at Tun Tavern. But he shifted the plug of chewing tobacco to the opposite cheek, swatted at the air, and moved on. “Day check fucked up some MAFs, and I’ve got the MO on my ass.”

Fortunately, he moved on to something Adam knew he could do. He might not have been a model Marine, but he knew a thing or two about computers and had become the “go to” in the Black Knights for navigating the brand-new Operational Data Integrated Network, known as ODIN.

“What tail?” Adam asked.

“Tails,” Gunny corrected.

Adam groaned, knowing it would take him longer to discover where the errant Maintenance Action Forms had disappeared to. He didn’t mind having the task to occupy his time while confined to the prison-like office space, but he knew the Maintenance Officer wanted an answer sooner than he could probably get it to him. And that meant Gunny would ride him like a swaybacked mule until he delivered. Shit really did roll downhill in the Marine Corps.

“Maintenance, flight deck,” the handheld radio perched on Gunny’s desk squawked.

Gunny saw Adam hesitate. “Get started, Garett.”

“Aye, Gunny.” He spun back to his terminal and logged in while keeping an ear turned to the radio.

“Go ahead,” he growled.

“They scrubbed the launch and are shutting everyone down.”

This time, it was Gunny who groaned. Without planes in the air, the focus would be on his department to get them ready for the next day. “Roger. Put ’em to bed, then come down off the roof.”

“We still got one airborne,” the staff sergeant on the other end of the radio said.

Gunny muttered a string of colorful curse words under his breath while Adam held his. “Which one?”

“Three oh seven.”

Adam couldn’t help himself. He glanced over at the flight schedule and saw they had assigned 307 to the visiting TOPGUN pilot. He exhaled, thankful it wasn’t one of the Marine pilots in his squadron. It wasn’t that he felt any particular allegiance to them; he just didn’t want the added distraction of knowing the guy at the controls.

Chen hadn’t given him all the details of what was supposed to happen, only that a jet wasn’t going to make it back to the ship. In truth, he didn’t want to know the details. He would have felt better if she hadn’t told him it was supposed to happen at all.

Now, as he sat in front of the computer, pretending to sift through thousands of ODIN files in search of the missing MAFs, his heart raced with anxiety. He knew somewhere out there, one of his squadron’s jets was going to crash. And some lieutenant he had never met before was going to die.

“Maintenance, CATCC,” the radio on Gunny’s desk squawked.

This is it, Adam thought. Any moment, Gunny was going to learn aircraft 307 went into the drink — the newest and most expensive fighter in the fleet vanished into the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean. Then he would direct Adam to lock down the files to prepare for the mishap investigation.

And Adam would act like any other lance corporal in the Marine Corps and follow his orders.

Gunny spit a long stream of tobacco juice before answering. “Go ahead.”