The stinking falcon stayed right with her, a hairbreadth behind as her wheels touched the concrete. Sora scream when she realized the F-15 intended to land alongside her. “Holy Mother of God! What are you doing?”

No plane could maneuverer on landing. It was straight-ahead stop or crash and flip into blazing oblivion. Planes were not equipped with side view mirrors to see what the drunk in the next line was doing. Turning one’s head during the landing was asking for trouble. Hands had an insidious way of following head direction.

Her back wheels touched at a speed of two hundred fifty miles an hour. The Vixen’s nose refuse to bite concrete because of the speed and the heat rising off the ground. Sora whipped past the painted mid-runway marker and broke every landing rule she’d ever learned. She turned to look for the bigger jet.

The F-15 came down like a rearing stallion. Rear wheels smoke as the fighter jet touched rubber on terra ferma. Nose up, it threatened to bite the backside of her Vixen. If she hit her retros too hard, he’d be on her and over her.

“I’m going to kill you!” Sora snapped back around, gripped the wheel so tight her nails dug into her palms. She put up flaps and the nose of the Vixen touched ground, then she switch on her retros and pressed the throttle forward, decelerating slowly, slowly, slowly. With precious little runway left, she closed her eyes, clenched her teeth and stomped on the brakes. Her whole body tensed, expecting instantaneous impact from the rear. It didn’t come. The Vixen crawled to a creep. Not jolt threw Sora flying into the console. No scream of mental crushing of explosion deafened her.

Sora opened her eyes. She was alive! Her hands flew over the console with professional precision, shutting off retros, snapping on ground lights, levelling flaps, unlocking the ground steering. The Vixen rolled to a dignified stop with twenty yards of concrete left.

The Kuwaiti fighter jet remained on her tail. A lane to the right promised to take the Vixen out of harm’s way.

The Saudi fighter jet had dropped much farther back. It flew low overhead, rumbling thunderously as it passed. Sora read that as an attempt to make certain she didn’t take the option of flying off on her own reconnaissance again. Had her fuel gauge read anything empty, she would have.

On empty, her only option was the taxi lane.

Kuwait 88-34601 her exhaust as she taxied off the runway.

Sora didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her she’d landed in a hornet’s nest of strategic defence engage in serious, massive scramble to arms.

The mouth of every half-buried sand hangar yawned wide open, disgorging planes and helicopters hastily fitted with bombs and rockets. The scream and drone of engines revving for take-off split the desert air. She saw an array of planes she hadn’t ever seen assembled together: American Harriers, F-14’s, F-15’s, French Mirage and British made Tornados. Saudi money could buy anything, Sora thought.

A groundsman flagged her off the crowded ramp, onto curiously marked parking. The Vixen’s bright blue-and-white wings looked gaudy against the host of desert-camouflage fighter jets. The sun was off the horizon by a hand span or two, the shadows long. The groundsman urge her under a stretch of netting that wafted in the wind like seaweed on a sandbar.

Once she parked, the groundsman chucked blocked beneath her wheels. Sora sat back and her arms went limp. The digital clock on the Vixen’s dash read 8:7 AM.

Omar the magnificent turned off the alley and drove his damn F-15 right up to her face, nose to nose. That wasn’t an accurate assessment, for the F-15 was three times the size of the Vixen. Its wicked gunner’s snout pointed way over the top of her plane, thank God. Still, Sora wanted to jump out and drag the pilot from his seat, then slap, kick, stomp and beat the everlasting hell out of the man.

He looked down from his bubble-shrouded windshield and grinned at her, revealing his dimple on one side of his cheek.

“Why, you stinking, dirty son…” Sora’s fear percolated to a rolling boil. Her hands moved, conditioned by years of training to switch off all systems, but her eyes never left his.

“You and me, Omar.” She let the steam out. “Alone, ten paces apart, any dream weapon you choose. Right here and now on broad daylight, bare handed, armed, I don’t give a damn. You owe me satisfaction.”

She doubted the arrogant bully comprehended her exact words, but she had no doubt he knew exactly what her thoughts were. And she’d be damned if she’d brake the stare down with the likes of him. He hadn’t cut her any slack. She refused to grant him any in return. He was no longer grinning like an idiot either.

Her ground air was still circling when the door of the Vixen’s cockpit was wrenched open. A blast of unholy, hotter-than-Hades air shot onto the cabin. A soldier reached up to jostle her out of the pilot’s seat. He stopped at his tracks and shouted at someone behind him that the pilot was a woman.

Not even that intrusion broke the stare down between Sora and the fighter pilot. His shoulder inclined forward, as he own did. She reach for the compartment that held her documents. He released the glass shield shrouding his finely formed head and shoulders. The elongated half bubble went up in a buzzed of hydraulic wizardry as he unfastened his dangling mask.

Locked in telepathic combat, his head moved in acknowledgement of the challenge given by her eyes. It was accepted. There was no expression on his face. It was unreadable, but Sora wasn’t reading his face, she was reading his soul, marking it.

A swarm of invaders rushed onto her plane from the passenger door, barking harsh, incomprehensible words, searching the planes unoccupied quarters.

Refusing to be rattled on the ground, Sora secured the plane. As an extra precaution, she calmly coded the computer prior to shutting down all systems. The sophisticated computer that monitored the Vixen’s functions could be accessed with one key password. The Vixen was as good as locked in a vault in Fort Knox. It could be jacked up and towed, but no one could fly it.

The lockout made it perfectly safe for Sora to leave the cockpit and step into the bedlam on the tarmac. 

Before doing so, Sora carefully removed the colourful scarf at her neck and used it to secure the loose hair at her nape. The hot wind on the ground was strong. She had no intention of flying hair while trying to make sense out of what was happening here, fight a language barrier and barter for tank of fuel.

Urged to disembark, she finally did so with her leather attaché case and a pocket Berlitz in Arabic.

Her spine almost refuse to straighten out, she’d been sitting for so long. She was a little n the dehydrated side and bone-tired. All thoughts of hunger and fatigue had evaporated a half hour over Kuwait International.

She actually welcomed the heat after so many hours in the rarefied atmosphere of the Vixen 2016-2, ignoring the phalanx of curious Saud soldiers, Sora turned to watch the Kuwaiti pilot descend to the ground.

Someone had the audacity to touch her hair as she was turning. The cold quelling look Sora gave the young made him drop his hand as if he had been burned. “Touch me again buddy, and I’ll ripped your heart out.”

She had no delusion that any of these men understood her threat, but they appeared to have never seen anyone like her. With some startled awe for her mode of dress, they gave her space, although not much. She turned back to the fighter jet pilot, somehow knowing that fate rested in his hands.

She hoped he spoke English. If she was truly lucky, he might have been trained to fly in her country.

Sora viewed the military pilots as cookie-cutter men, selected by present standards to fit into ever-decreasing cockpits.

The man who dropped to the tarmac in fatigues and dangling harness did also. He was a head taller than her. With a set of shoulders and muscular arms that a tall girl like herself would kill to have on a dance floor.

One sweep of her eyes and Sora noted the man’s unshaven jaw, his shadowed eyes and the striking combination of features that is angelica and unquestionably handsome. His mouth unsettled her the most. A sensuous, generous mouth that at this moment was grimly twisted a jutting, arrogant chin.

None of the babbling soldiers crowding her could look her in the eye. They were drones. She swept them out of her focus, concentrating only on Mr. Arrogance as he strode toward her.

He had rank, too. As he pressed through the melee, all on the saluted like a rigid jackdaws, leaping away from Sora. She caught a glimpse of gold stars winking on the shoulders of his fight suit.

Sora stiffened territorially before the plane that had brought her into his domain. One sharp command issued from him and the men backed off, giving him way. He stopped a few feet in front of her eyeing her face in assessment. A flicker of surprise glittered in the cool depths of his eyes, then faded behind an immutable expression. With deliberate ease, his eyes left hers and travelled insolently downward, sweeping across Sora’s sleekly fitted blue-and-white flight suit. Not once did his gaze travelled off her body to admire the beautiful airplane at her back.