Page 21 of Gryphon

After a few minutes of straight-and-level, Ingrid considered her first move. But before she had decided, Liisa nosed down. When she followed, Liisa nosed up until they were roller-coastering back and forth, one descending while the other climbed. A neat way to offer two constantly changing angles of fire while still staying tight on each other’s wing.

The next time she was high and Liisa was low, Ingrid did a wing-over-wing passing from Liisa’s starboard side over to port as she flipped once upside down. In moments, they were twisting one around the other like they were fired from a gatling gun.

All down the long stretch over the water between their two countries, they tried each other on for size until they were flowing like a single plane in two separate airframes.

They barely had to speak. A glance across the narrow air gap between them (once there was enough light to see each other by), a nod, a tip of the wing, a flirty kick of the tail: faultless communication to know to figure what the other would do next.

Reaching the Baltic proper, they carved to the east around the Hanko Peninsula, keeping well over Finnish territorial waters.

Twelve minutes later they reached Kotka—the last major Finnish town, thirty kilometers from Russia. In such perfect sync that Ingrid’s breath caught in her lungs, they turned southwest to avoid Gogland Island before cutting back southeast toward Estonia.

Women who flew jets. There was nothing sexier. It wasn’t an opinion; Ingrid knew it was purest fact. And they were two hot women in two very hot jets.

14

After the arrival of the prior day’s last freighter, the Koidutäht harbor tug hadn’t stayed in the Sillamäe, Estonia, port. Instead, hired at five times its normal hourly rate, the tug had struck north into the chill December darkness.

By dawn, it floated among the scattered winter ice halfway between Estonia and Finland, close off the north shore of Bolshoi Tyuters Island.

15

“For four hundred years before the Russian’s renamed it, we Finns called it Tytärsaari or Daughter’s Island. During the Winter War of 1939, when Russia attempted a takeover of Finland, we had to evacuate. In President Ryti’s godforsaken peace agreement, a tenth of the country, including Daughter’s Island, was ceded to Russia.” As Liisa told this in snippets over the radio, her tone of voice stated she was still warrior-pissed about it eighty years later.

Ingrid liked that about her. “Ouch!” She knew about Ryti, of course.

The Russians’ inability to quickly overrun the far smaller Finnish force had led Hitler to decide that Russia itself would be easily conquered and to launch his own attack, creating the Eastern Front of World War II.

Then President Ryti commanded Finland’s troops to side with Hitler’s Germany to take the war to their historical enemy, Russia. It hadn’t worked out well for the Finns.

“The Germans took the island next,” Liisa continued. “But even after their hasty overnight retreat in 1944, the West decided to cede it to the Soviets without asking Finland. Instead the West honored the 1940 peace treaty that had ended the Winter War, though they’d still insisted that war itself was an illegal act by the Russians.”

And then the Soviets had whupped on the Finns horribly in post-war reparations and land grabs as payback for Ryti siding with Germany against them. All Ryti’s own fault. He hadn’t merely sought to reclaim the prior land lost while sided with Germany in the Continuation War; for that he might have been forgiven. No, he’d then tried to invade the Soviet Union and grab a wider territory. The whole effort, and Ryti’s reign, collapsed in 1944 with the German retreat.

“My grandparents were born on Daughter’s Island. They and over four hundred former residents, who had carved a living for centuries from the exceptional fishing grounds around there, were never allowed to return.”

Which had to suck.

Then Liisa had laughed. Not a friendly laugh, but a warrior’s.

“For all that, the Russians won crap. Their lone lighthouse keeper knows better than to explore the two-mile-wide island beyond a few carefully cleared paths. In addition to massive amounts of abandoned equipment, the Germans left an untold number of mines. To this day its nickname is Mined Island.”

16

Aboard the tug Koidutäht, by prearrangement, the captain and crew were locked in the windowless hold for the duration of the operation. What you don’t know won’t kill you.

Whether that was true or not, the next few hours would tell.

The agent unfolded the half-meter-wide, two-point-five-gigahertz dish antenna that he’d picked up for a hundred euros online. When this was over, he’d tip it over the side into the depths of the Baltic without a trace. Attaching a transmitter, he readied himself to wait.

Two hours later—with nothing to keep him company but the occasional bumping of the ice against the hull—the sun broke fully clear of the horizon. Soon after, he spotted the two flecks of light approaching from the north. Two jets, exactly as this month’s joint-exercise roster had listed.

He turned on the transmitter and raised the handheld dish to aim it toward the passing jets.

17

Ingrid hated flying border patrols near Russia.

She’d never been comfortable with it. Sweden shared no border with Russia—Norway to the north and west and Finland to the east wrapped their arms around Sweden like mothers protecting a child.

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