6 June 2030 0220 hours
“Five, four, three, two, one!”
The pilot felt the hull touch the water and adjusted the throttle as her aircraft headed toward the pitch-black cove. She had been a Marine aviator for eight years, but every time she landed, it still felt as if her seaplane were made of burlap and balsa wood, not a high-tech carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer. The copilot spotted the infrared strobe through night-vision goggles and pointed out the Zodiac heading for the aircraft. Within five minutes, the squad of Marines was on board and scuttling their raft. Thirty-six hours prior, the team successfully launched stealthy antiship missiles at a People’s Liberation Army Navy Jiangdao-class corvette operating 500 nautical miles to the northwest.
The copilot sent an encrypted text confirming the pickup via burst transmission. In the passenger compartment, a flight surgeon waited to address the few medical issues that had surpassed the squad’s corpsman’s capabilities in the two months the Marines had been alone on the atoll.
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