I’m Marcus Reed, and five minutes ago, I was just a civilian contractor walking through the dusk air at Davis-Monthan Airfield. Now, I’m bleeding out on the oil-stained floor of a dark maintenance bay, staring up at the terrifying, tank-killing silhouette of an A-10 Warthog.
Vance, a man I once trusted with my life in Iraq, slammed me face-first into the aircraft’s heavy dual-wheel main landing gear. The impact opened a jagged gash above my eye, warm blood blinding my left side.
“Give me the launch key, Marcus!” Vance snarled, twisting my arm behind my back until the shoulder joint popped out of alignment.
I shrieked, pain tearing through my nervous system, but I kept my fist clenched around the gold-plated ignition bypass key. I had pulled it from the Warthog’s cockpit seconds before his rogue mercenaries ambushed me.
“You’re insane, Vance!” I choked out, spitting blood onto his tactical boots. “You’re going to level a city block! The GAU-8 Avenger will shred everything in a three-mile radius!”
“That’s the point!” he barked. He grabbed my hair, smashing my head back down against the concrete. “They sold this squadron out! They’re retiring the Warthog, replacing us with multi-role trash, burying our crimes in bureaucratic paper! Tonight, the Warthog roars one last time.”
He kicked me in the ribs. I rolled over, gasping for air, only to see three armed men in unmarked tactical gear rushing into the hangar. They carried heavy ammunition drums—each holding over a thousand 30mm armor-piercing incendiary shells.
Vance drew his sidearm, racking the slide with a cold click. He pointed the barrel right between my eyes. “Last chance, brother. Key, or I leave your brain on the nose cone.”
Vance’s thumb slipped off the safety, his eyes cold and unwavering. I could feel the cold concrete beneath me, but the fire in my chest told me this was far from over. The real nightmare was just getting started. The rest of the story is below 👇
Part 2
The metallic click of Vance’s sidearm echoed in the cavernous space of Hangar 4. Blood dripped down my nose, pooling on my upper lip with the copper taste of impending death. But Vance underestimated one thing: I built this machine. I knew every bolt, every hydraulic line, and every structural vulnerability of the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II better than the engineers who designed it.
As Vance flexed his trigger finger, I didn’t reach for his gun. Instead, I lashed out with my left boot, kicking the emergency hydraulic release lever sticking out from the A-10’s lower fuselage.
A high-pressure jet of red hydraulic fluid burst from the line with a deafening hiss, spraying directly into Vance’s eyes. He screamed in agony, dropping the pistol as the corrosive chemical burned his sight. I scrambled across the floor, grabbing his discarded sidearm, and fired two quick shots into the floor near the mercenaries. The loud cracks sent them diving behind ammo crates.
“Get the fuel truck hooked up!” Vance screamed, clutching his face, his skin blistering red. “Kill him! Don’t let him near the flight deck!”
I sprinted under the massive, low-hanging straight wings of the Warthog. Bullets whined off the heavy titanium tub surrounding the cockpit—the iconic “bathtub” designed to protect the pilot from anti-aircraft fire. It held against their assault rifles like light rain. I swung myself up into the ladder well, slipping into the tight cockpit, and slammed the canopy shut.
The mercenaries swarmed the perimeter, firing blindly at the bulletproof glass. Inside, the noise muffled to a dull thudding. My hands flew across the switches, muscle memory taking over. Electrical power: ON. Fuel pumps: ENGAGED. Auxiliary Power Unit: START.
The APU screamed to life behind me. Through the rear-view mirror, I saw something that turned my stomach to ice. Vance wasn’t just planning a random terror attack. Parked near the rear of the hangar was an unmarked Department of Defense transport trailer, spilling over with tactical satellite uplink crates.
This wasn’t a rogue veteran’s revenge. Vance was working for a shadow syndicate inside the defense apparatus itself. They were going to fly the A-10 into downtown Phoenix during the Governor’s summit, erase a high-ranking intelligence whistleblower before he could testify, and blame the entire massacre on a “rogue pilot suffering from PTSD.” They were going to use me as the dead scapegoat.
“You’re too late, Marcus!” Vance’s voice crackled through the cockpit’s emergency radio frequency. He was standing on the service gantry, holding a remote detonator. “Look at the fuel cell telemetry on your center console!”
My eyes darted to the fuel gauges. The four primary tanks near the aircraft’s center of gravity were fully loaded, but the auxiliary lines were rigged with thermite charges.
“If you try to taxi out of here,” Vance sneered over the comms, “I blow the self-sealing fuel bladders. You’ll burn alive inside twenty-two thousand pounds of aluminum and aviation gas.”
A cold sweat broke out across my back. The twist hit me like a physical blow: Vance hadn’t just ambushed me tonight; he had set this trap weeks ago. Every system override code I had typed into the maintenance log had been recorded and manipulated. My fingerprints were on every bomb, every shell, and every flight plan.
Outside, the two massive General Electric TF34 turbofan engines mounted high on the rear fuselage began to spool up, drawing air into their massive fans. The vibration rattled my teeth. The mercenaries were attaching a tow bar to the nose wheel, preparing to force the plane onto the runway by remote winch.
I looked down at the control stick. In the center of the panel sat the manual reversion system switch—the mechanical cable bypass that allowed a pilot to fly the plane even if both hydraulic systems were destroyed. If I flipped it, I could bypass Vance’s electronic lockouts, but it would lock the wheel controls to manual physical leverage.
I grabbed the heavy throttle levers, slammed them forward, and pulled the emergency brake manual release. The A-10 lurched forward with violently raw, unrefined mechanical power, crushing the tow winch beneath its nose landing gear. Vance screamed over the radio as the aircraft broke free, rolling straight toward the locked steel hangar doors.
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