“Is this your family, Captain?” the General asked, holding my Distinguished Flying Cross toward me. I looked past him at my father—once so proud, so loud, so certain I was a disappointment—now standing amid shattered glass and spilled bourbon with tears running down his face. For thirty years, he had mocked me in front of anyone willing to listen, but the answer I gave that General made the entire room fall completely silent.

The roar of the twin TF34 engines filled the cockpit as Red Lead surged down the runway at Peterson Space Force Base.

At one hundred and forty knots, I pulled back gently on the control stick. The heavy titanium nose lifted into the air, the main gear retracted with a solid mechanical thud, and forty thousand pounds of war machine broke free from the earth.

I banked the aircraft hard to the west, climbing steeply into the morning light.

Beside me, eleven grey A-10s rose out of the mist in perfect, tight tactical formation, their wings catching the first rays of golden sunlight over the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

“Red Flight, this is Red Lead,” I said through the squadron radio channel, my voice crystal clear, calm, and commanding. “Check in.”

“Red Two, two’s good.”

“Red Three, three’s good.”

“Red Four, four’s good.”

Down below, the city of Denver was a tiny grid of grey streets and glittering glass buildings, looking fragile and insignificant against the vast expanse of the mountains and the sky.

I looked down at my left wrist. The silver watch Mike had given me caught the light, its second hand ticking rhythmically in the absolute quiet of the cockpit.

08:15 UTC.

For thirty years, Richard Hayes had believed that the world was built on contracts, mergers, and the fear he could instill in a courtroom. He believed that power was something you inherited or took from others through clever arguments and expensive suits.

He had lived his entire life inside a small, glass room of his own making, surrounded by people who agreed with him because they were afraid to leave.

I looked out over the wingtip of my jet at the endless, deep blue sea of the upper atmosphere stretching for three thousand miles toward the Pacific.

I hadn't built my life in a courtroom. I had built it in the snow, in the thunder, and in the dark canyons of the world where courage wasn't a legal strategy—it was the only thing that kept you alive.