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“Seraph? It’s certainly catchy. My crew will be counting on you for the next few hours, so just make sure you live up to it.” After a quick handshake, Carter jogs away to supervise his men as they begin boarding their transports.
The next hour is uneventful – at least for you. The boarding sequence was the same. The takeoff protocol never really changed. And besides for a barely perceptible loss of responsiveness during banking turns, you could barely tell that your gunship had been modified to carry extra ordinance.
But thirty miles from the boundary of the occluded area, the situation begin to change. You notice it through the radios first. A sharp clicking noise – like the report of particularly persistent woodpecker – begins to break up the status updates from central command. At first the interference is merely annoying. But as you cross the perimeter, the frequency and intensity of the interference renders their messages nearly incomprehensible. After spending a few fruitless minutes trying to reconnect, you deactivate the channel entirely to block out the incessant noise.
Fortunately, the local comm net was still functional. Your connection to the ground team is significantly worse than what you would expect, but you could hear them well enough. This was good. Now that your line to central command was severed, nominal command over the operation fell on you as the ranking operative. Even if you didn’t have the intention – or knowledge – to micromanage the ground team, a regular line of communication would still be crucial.
It would be especially important given the terrain. Here – nearly fifty kilometers into the occluded area – the woodland is hidden by a thick layer of dense, shifting fog. It wasn’t natural. You’ve run enough missions in adverse-weather conditions to know how fog should behave. And this didn’t match the profile at all. You hoped that it would clear slightly once you reached the AO. Otherwise, you would have to either fly low-level or lose visual of the ground team entirely.
As you scan the treeline for objects of interest, you see a structure poking up from the dense mist. Human made, with a soft glow of…lighting? It was a firewatch station. One of the manned lookout towers marked on the map you studied last night.
