Page 22 of Gryphon

Oh, she’d flown joint missions through both the Nordic Battlegroup and NORDEFCO, the five-country Nordic Defense Cooperation. Each time it took her along the Russian border it felt like the worst flight imaginable. A lone Swede ghosting along the edge of the brute, half afraid he’d wake up and half wishing he would so that he could be put down hard once and for all.

But one didn’t anger the bear in his den, especially not a bear armed with nuclear weapons.

NATO had slowly wrapped around Russia, but it was far from the cage everyone hoped for. The Russian bear kept swiping out with its claws: Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and now the Ukraine. Who would the Russians war on next?

By joining NATO, Finland and now Sweden were yet another part of the cage, but many of the bars were weak and the bear kept testing them.

She shook her head, trying to clear away the miasma of gray hopelessness that threatened to swamp her.

Did Liisa feel it flying beside her? She flew with such joy, such a reaching that Ingrid felt better for simply flying beside her.

And it was a beautiful morning. The sky shone with a crisp winter blue. The dark Baltic waters speckled with snow-dusted islands.

A scan of her instruments showed no threat warnings coming up out of Russia. And because of the flight restrictions since the Ukraine War, there was little commercial air traffic so close to the border.

And she flew in.

She performed a pair of four-point snap rolls—knife edge-hold, inverted-hold, other knife edge-hold, return to straight-and-level flight, then the same in reverse—to remind herself that of all miracles, she’d earned the right to fly her Gripen.

A motion caught her eye.

A motion where there shouldn’t be one.

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The signal broadcast upward from the tugboat Koidutäht washed over the two jets flying side-by-side. The signal was too weak to cause an alert from any of the onboard threat-warning mechanisms. Especially not at the frequency transmitted—close below air traffic control frequencies. Battlefield and missile targeting radar were typically five times higher in frequency.

The signal strength wavered several times as the agent aboard the tug attempted to keep the small dish centered on the passing aircraft. Not an easy task against their motion across the sky and the tug’s rolling in the winter waves.

Due to the cold, the transmitter’s battery strength was less than calculated and it wasn’t strong enough to penetrate through the lower section of the fuselage.

But then the Gripen JAS 39E performed a sharp four-point snap roll.

During the first roll, the agent’s aim drifted wide because of a wave that threw him against a bulwark hard enough to bruise. He almost lost the antenna overboard sooner than planned.

But then the plane rolled back.

When it entered the inverted position, the signal passed easily through the canopy, the inside of Ingrid’s right thigh, and was picked up by a small antenna embedded under her seat cushion.

The signal triggered the receiver hidden there.

The receiver in turn closed a relay connecting a pair of batteries to a high-force linear actuator that had cost the agent another forty euros at everyone’s favorite online package provider. He’d installed it himself last week when this mission was first listed, during a routine seat maintenance check. The device wouldn’t be seen until the next seat inspection not scheduled for another five months. Of course, now this bird would never see that maintenance check.

He'd liked Ingrid—always polite to her bird’s mechanics. A pity she didn’t like men, what a waste of a pretty woman. But not having slept with her saved him from feeling the least bit bad when it was her name that came up on the duty roster. Could have been anyone. Wouldn’t matter to him, they paid him for the result, not who did the flying.

The actuator’s lower end was anchored to the structure of the seat and the upper end to the back of the ejection handle.

The mechanism began extending its central thrust arm.

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Had her seat ejection handles actually moved?

The yellow-and-black-striped loop lay close between Ingrid’s thighs—an easy grab no matter what g-forces slammed the jet during an emergency.

She knew there’d been a crash early in the Gripen’s deployment when a series of hard maneuvers had caused the pilot’s lower-body pressure suit to inflate and deflate repeatedly. It drove blood out of the lower body and back toward the heart during high-g actions. The section of the suit along the inner thighs had also repeatedly squeezed and raised the ejection handle until the pilot abruptly left his aircraft without intending to.

But they’d fixed that fifteen years ago by altering the circular handle into a reverse teardrop shape, narrow between her thighs with an easy to grab loop above.

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