This battery, about the size of a shoebox, powered the latest upgrade to the fighter's suite of stealth technologies. Jammed behind his headrest was an auxiliary battery unit whose hum seemed impossibly loud, even over the F-35's turbofan engine. He merely watched the controls, admired the view out his canopy, and listened to the ghost of his great-grandfather taunting him from a nonexistent back seat. The flight plan had been inputted into the F-35's onboard navigation computer. In fact, flying with such precision took no skill at all. This was but one of the many gripes Wedge had with the fighter he was piloting so close to Iranian airspace that he was literally dancing his starboard wing along the border. When he'd toss his cigarette out of the cockpit and slam his canopy shut, you knew he meant business and you were about to tangle with a flight of Zeros.) You'd watch it close, but you'd also watch Pappy. And when you flew with Pappy you learned pretty quick to watch your horizon. We'd mark our gunsights on the canopy with a grease pencil and off we'd fly.
It was just your skill, your controls, and your luck. ( Back when I flew with Pappy, and we'd be on patrol, it wasn't all whizbang like you have it now. This elusive it, which had held four generations of Mitchells in its thrall, was the sensation of flying by the seat of your pants, on pure instinct alone. “Pop-Pop,” his great-grandfather, had felt it most of all, patrolling the South Pacific for Japanese Zeros with VMF-214, the famed Black Sheep squadron led by the hard-drinking, harder-fighting five-time Marine Corps ace Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. “Pop,” his grandfather, had felt it more than them both when, for five exhausting days, he'd dropped snake and nape with nothing more than an optical sight on treetop passes during Tet, where he dusted in so low the flames had blistered the fuselage of his A-4 Skyhawk. His father had felt it a bit more than him, like that one time the FLIR on his F/A-18 Hornet had failed and he'd pickle-barreled two GBU-38s “danger close” for a platoon of grunts in Ramadi, using nothing but a handheld GPS and a map.
Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell hardly ever felt it. On the deck plates of her seven ships she was affectionately known as the “Lion Queen.” And then herself as she was now: the older, wiser Captain Sarah Hunt, commodore of Destroyer Squadron 21- Solomons Onward, their motto since the Second World War “Rampant Lions,” the name they gave themselves. Herself as she once was: the youthful Ensign Sarah Hunt. She stood at the pinnacle of her career, and when she stared off in the direction of her other ships, searching for them in the wake of her flagship, she couldn't help but see herself out there, as clearly as if she were standing on that tabletop of perfectly calm ocean, appearing and disappearing into the shimmer.
She was the commodore, in charge of these three warships, as well as another four still back in their home port of San Diego. Extending in its wake, arrayed in a line of battle over the flat horizon, were her other two destroyers, the Carl Levin and Chung-Hoon. She glanced behind her, toward the fantail of her flagship, the John Paul Jones. Her memory darted back and forth across those long years, to her watch-standing days as an ensign on the wood-slatted decks of a minesweeper with its bronchial diesel engines, to her mid-career hiatus in special warfare spent in the brown waters of the world, to this day, with these three sleek Arleigh Burke-class destroyers under her command cutting a south-by-southwest wake at eighteen knots under a relentless and uncaring sun. How many times over her career had she stood as she did now, on the bridge of a ship, observing this miracle of stillness? A thousand times? Two thousand? On a recent sleepless night, she had studied her logbooks and totaled up all the days she had spent traversing the deep ocean, out of sight of land. She imagined that if a single needle were dropped from a height, it would slip through all the fathoms of water to the seabed, where, undisturbed by any current, it would rest on its point. It surprised her still, even after twenty-four years, the way from horizon to horizon the vast expanse of ocean could in an instant turn completely calm, taut as a linen pulled across a table.