Page 50 of Ace

“I think you need to go back. It’s escalating into the type of thing we hoped to avoid at Top Flight.”

”You mean staying out of the international hot spots?” Dex shook his head. “Who could have predicted that the Pacific Oceanic Alliance would be anything but clear skies and typical fighter pilot training?”

“There’s more.” Amanda’s voice made him brace himself.

“What is it?”

“They’ve discovered a large warehouse on Panau. Some intelligence we’re intercepting is calling it a weapons facility.”

“What!”

“Right. And so now talks have escalated. It might be time for us to step back and advise the Pacific Alliance to do the same.”

“They’re not going to back down. This is exactly why they created an alliance in the first place.”

“I understand that. But maybe they need someone telling them to wait this out. If Mantuk is building weapons on the island, it needs to be shut down. Even if the Alliance won’t like that.”

Dex ran a hand over his face, thinking of the people on the island. Gianna’s face, filled with love for them, filled his thoughts. “I’m not sureIlike it.”

“None of us do, but this might be out of our control. And we really don’t want to be a literal target of US planes.”

“Agreed.” Dex’s mind spun. He had to de-escalate this. He had to get over there stat. And he absolutely had to do whatever it took to protect the people on that island.

And he couldn’t tell Gianna any of this. She would find out through the media eventually, but he was emotionally distracted enough without her voice in his ear, without her doing something crazy like he was about to do. Was he going to do something crazy? When he thought of the good people on Panau and how he’d regretted his previous inaction for over a year, he knew he just might do something crazy. But he couldn’t have Gianna also doing crazy things.

“I’ll leave before light.”

“You got this.” Even Flyboy’s usually carefree voice sounded tight and concerned. “Just don’t call begging for another extraction.”

“Hopefully it all de-escalates as quickly as things have escalated. And team, my next mission? It’s going to be somewhere simple, remote, and easy.”

“You got it, Ace.” Ridley’s serious, almost stern tone brought the gravity of the situation even closer to home. “Let’s check in again once you’re there for twenty-four hours.”

They hung up. Then he put a call in to Ivy. “So I hear things are getting complicated.”

“Ace. We need you out here.” To her credit, Ivy sounded more matter-of-fact than emotional.

“I’m leaving before light.”

Her soft exhale said much more to him about her emotional state. “We can catch you up to speed when you get here, but I’m not sure about our typical training runs today. The Mantukese still patrol the airspace. So far there have been no hostile interactions, but I don’t want to trigger anything.”

“But desisting today might be viewed as a submission, and we don’t want to give that impression either. If we continue as normal, it says we are not viewing the situation as an act of aggression toward us, that we are doing what we’ve always done, which is train new pilots of the Alliance.”

Her silence lasted long enough that he began to feel frustrated. “Just say what you have to say, Tenderfoot.”

“They’re going to want to bomb the facility.”

“Agreed.”

“Are we going to let them do that?”

“Let’s talk about it when I get there. In the meantime, no one bombs anything.”

“Roger that.”

When they hung up, he mumbled under his breath. “Unless we beat them to it.”

He rested his face in his hands for a full two minutes before he wrote a quick note to Gianna.I’m sorry. Trust me. Call me when you wake up.

---