It was already a bad morning.
The Arizona heat had started pushing through the hangar doors before eight, flattening the air inside Davis-Monthan like a hot palm. The old concrete floor still held the cool of the night in patches, but not enough to matter. By noon it would smell like jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, burned coffee, and desert dust baked into steel. Riley had been at Hangar 14 since sunrise, helping prep one of the restored Warthogs for a readiness inspection that every officer above her pay grade was treating like a holy event.
The aircraft sat above her like a bad-tempered dinosaur. Gray skin. Scarred panels. Nose art faded by years and sun. The open gun bay beneath it exposed the machine’s ugly heart—wiring, brackets, housings, metal that was never meant to be pretty, only dependable. The plane had a name painted small beneath the cockpit: Saint.
Riley preferred old machines to people. Machines lied less.
“Tell me you found it,” called Chief Master Sergeant Hank Dugan from somewhere above her.
“Depends,” Riley said, tightening her grip on the wrench. “Do you want the truth or the version you can repeat to officers without sweating?”
Dugan snorted. He was sixty if he was a day, built like an oak cabinet, and had spent enough years in Air Force maintenance to look permanently carved out of dust and sarcasm. “I want the plane ready by eleven.”
