Hot Shots!

A disgraced ace returns to the sky to clear his father’s name—through war, chaos, and love—where every laugh is a weapon and every flight could be his last.

Watch the original version of Hot Shots!

## Prologue — A Straight Line Through Crooked Air

The first thing you learn about silence is that it is never empty.

It has grain. It has temperature. It has a way of taking the shape of whatever you refuse to say. Out in the pines, where the cabin sat like a forgotten boot at the edge of the world, silence collected in the corners and under the table and behind Topper Harley’s eyes. It pooled there, dark and patient, waiting for him to blink.

He had come to the mountains to escape noise: engines, voices, laughter that sounded like judgment, applause that sounded like a verdict. He had come to escape the story that had attached itself to his last name like chewing gum to a dress shoe.

Harley.

A name that, on base, could still make men whistle low and tilt their heads as if listening for a distant crash.

His father’s crash.

Topper tried not to think of it as a crash. He tried to think of it as an accident, a miscalculation, a mechanical failure, an unlucky gust—anything with the clean, blunt mercy of physics. But the rumors had never been merciful. Rumors were imaginative. Rumors had hobbies.

They said his father had panicked. They said he had frozen. They said he had broken formation and cost other men their lives. They said he had been drunk. They said he had been brave in the wrong direction. They said so many things that the truth, whatever it was, had been buried beneath them like a body under flowers.

Topper didn’t know which version hurt most. The one where his father was a coward, or the one where his father was a hero and the world refused to admit it.

He chopped wood to keep his hands busy. It was honest work in the way that flying was honest: you could not pretend the blade was sharp when it wasn’t; you could not pretend the air would hold you if you treated it casually. The log split with a clean crack, and for a moment the sound felt like relief.

He stacked the pieces neatly, because neatness was a kind of prayer. Then he split another log. Then another.

His cabin was small, built from rough boards and stubbornness. A kettle sat on the stove. A chair with one leg shorter than the others waited by the table. A radio, unplugged, sat like a temptation. He had bought it for emergencies and then decided that most of life was an emergency and he didn’t want to hear about any of them.

On the wall hung a photograph in a cracked frame: a young man in a flight suit, grinning as if the world had never heard of gravity. His father’s grin. His father’s eyes. The kind of face you trusted without meaning to.

Topper kept the photograph turned slightly toward the wall, not hidden, but not staring at him either. A compromise. The sort of compromise you made with ghosts.

Outside, the wind moved through the pines with a soft, conspiratorial hiss. Snow still clung in patches where the sun didn’t reach. The air smelled of sap and cold stone. Somewhere, a bird insisted on being alive.

Topper wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and looked at the sky. It was a clean blue, the kind of sky that made pilots nostalgic and poets insufferable. A sky that looked innocent.

He had almost convinced himself that he was safe here. Safe from the past, safe from the Air Force, safe from the whole bright, loud machine of war.

Then the sound came.

At first it was only a vibration in the ribs, a low thrum that could have been thunder if thunder had been disciplined. It grew quickly, turning from a suggestion into a statement. The trees trembled. The kettle on the stove rattled as if nervous.

Topper’s jaw tightened. His hand went to the axe handle without thinking, the way a man might reach for a rosary.

A helicopter appeared over the ridge like an uninvited thought. It was painted military gray and seemed offended by the idea of subtlety. It hovered, it dipped, it corrected itself with the fussy impatience of a fly that had learned mathematics.

It settled into the clearing with a storm of snow and pine needles. The rotors threw the world into chaos. Topper squinted against the grit. His hair whipped into his eyes. The axe in his hand suddenly felt ridiculous, like a prop in the wrong play.

When the rotors finally slowed, the clearing was a mess. Snow had been rearranged into new, less attractive shapes. A small tree leaned at an angle it hadn’t chosen. The air smelled of fuel and intrusion.

The side door slid open. A ladder clanged down. A man in a crisp uniform descended with the careful gravity of someone stepping onto a stage. Behind him came two more men, carrying a large duffel bag and a clipboard as if those were weapons.

The first man smiled. It was the kind of smile that had been trained, like a dog.

“Topper Harley?” he called, projecting his voice across the clearing as though the mountains were an audience.

Topper did not answer right away. He stood in the doorway of his cabin, axe in hand, shirt damp with sweat, boots muddy, looking like a lumberjack who had accidentally auditioned for a war movie.

“I’m not home,” Topper said.

The man blinked once, processing the joke with a delay that suggested it had to travel through paperwork first. Then he laughed politely, as if laughter were part of his job description.

“Captain Benjamin ‘Topper’ Harley,” the man tried again, consulting his clipboard, “United States Navy, currently on leave—”

“Not leave,” Topper corrected. “Hiding.”

The man’s smile faltered and then returned, brighter, as if he had turned up its wattage.

“Sir, I’m Lieutenant—”

“I didn’t ask.”

The lieutenant took a breath, clearly determined to complete the script. “We need you back.”

Topper leaned the axe against the doorframe and folded his arms. “You need a lot of things. A new haircut. A better helicopter pilot. A sense of shame.”

The lieutenant’s eyes flicked to the cabin, to the woodpile, to the turned photograph he could not see. He seemed to be looking for a weakness, a handle.

“You have a unique skill set,” he said, as if reading from a brochure.

Topper snorted. “So does my stomach. It can digest canned beans without crying.”

The two men behind the lieutenant shifted their weight. One of them sneezed, then tried to hide it by coughing, then tried to hide the cough by clearing his throat, then gave up and looked ashamed.

The lieutenant stepped closer, lowering his voice as though intimacy would help. “This is about your father.”

The clearing went quiet in a new way. The helicopter’s engine ticked as it cooled, a small metallic heartbeat. Somewhere in the trees, the bird stopped singing as if it too had heard the name.

Topper’s face did not change much. It had learned how to stay still. But something behind his eyes tightened, a small knot pulled hard.

“My father is dead,” Topper said. “He’s been dead for a long time. If you need him, you’re late.”

The lieutenant swallowed. “We have reason to believe… there are people who still think—”

“I know what people think,” Topper said, and his voice was calm, which was the dangerous part. “People think my father was a coward. People think he was a traitor. People think the Harley name is cursed. People think a lot of things. People also think diet soda is healthy.”

The lieutenant held up a hand, a gesture of surrender. “Captain Harley, there’s a mission. It’s important. We need the best pilots.”

Topper looked past him, toward the helicopter, toward the gray metal and the spinning blades that had carved their way into his quiet life.

“Find someone else,” Topper said.

The lieutenant’s smile faded for real this time. “We did.”

Topper raised an eyebrow.

“They’re all dead,” the lieutenant added quickly, then winced at his own words as if they had slipped out without permission. He recovered, straightening his posture. “Not all of them. Some of them are… unavailable.”

Topper stared at him. In the lieutenant’s eyes he saw not malice, not cruelty, but the bland urgency of the institution. The Air Force did not hate him. It simply did not care about his peace.

Topper turned toward the cabin, as if to go back inside and close the door. The lieutenant took a step forward.

“Captain—Topper—” he said, abandoning formality like a man dropping luggage, “you can’t run forever.”

Topper paused with his hand on the door.

“I can run as long as I want,” he said quietly. “I’m a pilot.”

He went inside and shut the door.

For a moment there was nothing but the muffled sound of voices outside, the scrape of boots, the faint clang of metal. Topper leaned his forehead against the door. The wood was cold. He breathed in, out, slow.

He told himself to ignore them. He told himself that silence was a wall, that he could build it back up. He told himself a lot of things.

Then came a new sound: a sharp, sudden crack. Something hit the roof. Dust drifted from the ceiling.

Topper’s eyes widened. He looked up.

Another crack. Another thud.

He yanked the door open. “What are you doing?”

Outside, one of the men with the duffel bag had produced a flare gun and was firing flares into the air with cheerful incompetence. Each flare arced upward, sputtered, and fell back down, landing on the cabin roof like angry fireflies.

The man waved. “Signal flares, sir!”

“You’re signaling who?” Topper shouted. “The squirrels?”

The lieutenant grabbed the flare gun, fumbling with it like it was a live fish. “Stop! Stop that!”

A flare launched anyway, shooting sideways, streaking into the trees. A moment later, a distant whoosh and then a small, alarming glow.

The lieutenant stared into the forest. “That’s… not ideal.”

Topper rubbed his face with both hands. He could feel the laughter trying to rise in him, the absurdity of it all. It was a familiar defense mechanism: if you laughed, maybe you didn’t have to scream.

The lieutenant cleared his throat. “Captain Harley, please. We’re not leaving without you.”

Topper looked at the helicopter, at the men, at the little fire beginning to lick at the edge of the clearing. He looked at the sky, still innocent, still blue.

He thought of his father’s photograph turned toward the wall. He thought of the rumors. He thought of the way men on base said Harley like it tasted bad.

He thought of flying—of the clean, sharp honesty of it.

He exhaled.

“Fine,” he said. “But if I die, I’m haunting you.”

The lieutenant’s face brightened with relief. “Thank you, sir.”

Topper pointed at the small fire. “Put that out.”

The lieutenant turned and barked orders. The men scrambled, patting at the flames with their hands, then with their hats, then with the clipboard, which immediately caught fire.

Topper watched them for a long moment, the corners of his mouth twitching.

Silence, he realized, had not been empty. It had been waiting. And now it had been broken, not by thunder, but by a flare gun and a clipboard on fire.

He went inside, grabbed his jacket, and, almost as an afterthought, turned the photograph back toward the room. His father’s grin met his eyes.

Topper held the gaze for a heartbeat.

“I’m going back,” he murmured. “Try not to look so happy about it.”

Then he stepped out into the rotor wash and let the loud machine of the world carry him away.

—

## Chapter One — The Return of Topper Harley

The helicopter ride to civilization felt less like travel and more like being shaken inside a metal box by a bored god.

Topper sat strapped into a seat that had been designed by someone who hated spines. Across from him, the lieutenant—whose name Topper still had not learned and did not intend to—held his clipboard like a comfort blanket. The two other men sat on either side, trying to look alert while their heads bobbed with the rhythm of turbulence.

Every few minutes the helicopter lurched, and one of the men would make a small, involuntary noise, as if his soul had briefly left his body and then returned, apologizing.

Topper stared out the open side door at the landscape passing below. The mountains rolled away into foothills, then into roads, then into the flat geometry of human planning. He felt his stomach tighten—not with fear of flying, never that, but with the knowledge of where he was going.

Back to a base full of faces that remembered.

Back to hangars that smelled like fuel and ambition.

Back to the place where his father’s name was a story people told each other to feel better about their own mistakes.

The lieutenant leaned forward, raising his voice over the roar. “Captain Harley—Topper—sir—”

Topper did not look at him.

“We’ve arranged for you to be reinstated immediately. Your record—”

“My record is fine,” Topper said. “It’s my family record that people like to scribble on.”

The lieutenant hesitated. “This mission is… sensitive.”

Topper finally turned his head. “Sensitive like a baby? Or sensitive like classified documents?”

The lieutenant blinked. “Classified.”

Topper nodded slowly. “So it’s going to be stupid.”

The lieutenant looked offended, as if stupidity were a personal insult to the military rather than one of its key ingredients. “Sir, the enemy has developed a new weapons system. We believe they’re planning to test it—”

A sudden jolt threw everyone upward in their seats. The lieutenant’s clipboard flew out of his hands and smacked one of the men in the face. The man yelped, then tried to pretend he hadn’t.

Topper watched, expressionless.

The lieutenant retrieved the clipboard, cheeks flushed. “As I was saying—”

Topper raised a hand. “Save it. If it’s classified, you shouldn’t be telling me anyway. I might be a spy.”

The lieutenant stared at him.

Topper gave him a small, innocent smile. “I’m kidding. Spies have better hair.”

The helicopter dipped again, and the lieutenant gripped his clipboard with both hands, as if it were the only thing keeping him from falling out.

Topper leaned back and let the noise wash over him. He tried to imagine the base as it would look now. He had been gone long enough for paint to fade, for new posters to go up, for old jokes to be replaced by new ones. But he knew the essential shape of it would remain: the runway like a long accusation, the control tower like a finger pointed at the sky.

When the helicopter finally descended toward the base, Topper felt a familiar tightening in his chest. Not fear. Something older. Something like being called to the principal’s office as a child, knowing you were innocent but also knowing innocence was not always relevant.

The base appeared below: a grid of buildings, hangars, tarmac, and the long strip of runway cutting through it like a scar. Jets sat in neat rows, sleek and predatory, their noses pointed outward as if impatient.

The helicopter touched down with a bounce that made Topper’s teeth click. The rotors slowed. The door slid open. Hot air rushed in, carrying the smell of fuel, asphalt, and overcooked cafeteria food.

Topper stepped out and stood on the tarmac. The sun was bright, too bright, making everything look slightly unreal, like a dream that had been overexposed.

A group of officers waited nearby. At their center stood a man with a chest full of medals and a posture full of confidence. He was tall, square-shouldered, and wore his uniform as if it were a costume he had been born in.

Commander Block.

Topper recognized him immediately, though he had never met him. Block had a reputation that traveled faster than jets: a man who had survived every war since the invention of gunpowder, mostly by being too confused to be shot.

Block stepped forward, smiling broadly. “Harley!”

Topper walked toward him, boots clicking on the tarmac. “Commander.”

Block extended his hand. Topper shook it. Block’s grip was strong, but his eyes were slightly unfocused, as if he were looking at Topper through a memory that wasn’t quite accurate.

“Good to have you back,” Block said. “We need men like you. Men with… grit.”

Topper nodded. “I have grit. It’s in my teeth.”

Block laughed, delighted, though it wasn’t clear he understood the joke. He clapped Topper on the shoulder with such force that Topper took a small step sideways.

“Come,” Block said, gesturing grandly. “We’ll get you settled. Then we’ll brief you on the mission. Then we’ll—”

Block stopped abruptly, his gaze drifting past Topper’s shoulder. His face brightened even more. “Oh! There it is.”

Topper turned to see what he was looking at.

A cannon.

Not a modern weapon. A ceremonial cannon, painted black and polished, sitting on wooden wheels near the edge of the tarmac like a relic from a time when wars had been fought with more smoke and less paperwork. A small plaque beside it gleamed in the sun.

Block walked toward it with the eager stride of a man approaching an old friend. “Beautiful, isn’t it? They brought it in for the ceremony.”

Topper followed, wary. “What ceremony?”

Block waved a hand. “Oh, you know. The ceremony. For morale. For… the thing.”

He stepped up onto the cannon’s wooden carriage, placing one polished shoe on the wheel, then the other, as if mounting a horse. He looked pleased with himself.

Topper frowned. “Commander, you probably shouldn’t—”

Block held up a finger. “Nonsense. I’ve ridden bigger guns than this.”

He shifted his weight. The cannon rocked slightly. Block’s expression remained serene.

Then the wheel slipped.

Block’s foot slid. His arms flailed. For a moment he windmilled like a man trying to fly without a plane. Then he fell forward, landing squarely on the cannon barrel with a grunt of surprise.

There was a metallic clank.

A pause.

Then—somehow—the cannon fired.

The boom rolled across the tarmac, startling birds into the air and causing several nearby mechanics to duck instinctively. A cloud of smoke belched from the cannon’s mouth. The recoil jerked the carriage backward, and Block, still draped over the barrel, was carried with it like laundry on a line.

Topper stood frozen, watching the smoke drift.

A distant crash sounded from somewhere across the base, followed by the faint shatter of glass.

Block lifted his head slowly, blinking through the smoke. His hair was slightly askew. His face was smeared with soot, giving him the look of a man who had tried to kiss a chimney.

He smiled at Topper. “Still got it.”

Topper opened his mouth, then closed it again. He could not find words that fit what he had just seen.

One of the officers rushed forward. “Commander! Are you all right?”

Block waved him off, sliding awkwardly off the cannon. “Of course I’m all right. I meant to do that. It’s a… tradition.”

Topper glanced toward the distant crash site. A thin plume of smoke rose near what looked like the officers’ parking lot.

Block followed his gaze, squinting. “Huh. Must’ve hit something important.”

Topper said nothing. He could feel the laughter again, trying to bubble up, not because it was funny—though it was—but because the alternative was despair.

Block clapped his hands together. “All right! Let’s get you to the briefing room.”

They walked across the tarmac. As they passed a row of pilots, Topper felt eyes on him. Some curious, some amused, some openly hostile. He heard murmurs, half-words, the soft hiss of gossip.

“Harley…”

“Is that him?”

“Thought he was done.”

“His old man—”

Topper kept his face neutral. He had learned long ago that anger only fed them. If you reacted, they knew they’d found a tender spot. Better to give them nothing. Better to be smooth, impenetrable.

Still, the words slid under his skin.

Inside the main building, the air-conditioning hit him like a slap. The hallway smelled of floor polish and stale coffee. Posters lined the walls: recruitment slogans, safety warnings, a faded pin-up calendar that someone had tried to make official by laminating it.

Block led him to an office. “This will be yours.”

Topper stepped inside. It was small, with a desk, a chair, and a window that looked out onto the runway. On the desk sat a stack of forms, a pen on a chain, and a small potted plant that looked like it had given up.

Topper picked up one of the forms. It was titled WELCOME BACK.

He set it down.

Block stood in the doorway, smiling as if he had just presented Topper with a mansion rather than a closet. “Not much, but it’s home.”

Topper looked out the window at the runway. A jet taxied slowly, its engines whining. The pilot’s helmet glinted in the sun.

Home, Topper thought. The word tasted strange. Like something he used to like but couldn’t remember why.

Block cleared his throat. “Now, about the mission.”

Topper turned back to him. “Before the mission,” he said, “I want to know something.”

Block’s smile softened. “Of course.”

“Why me?” Topper asked. “Really.”

Block’s eyes flickered, just for a moment. Something passed through them—calculation, perhaps, or the faint shadow of pity.

Then Block chuckled, as if Topper had asked a charming question. “Because you’re the best.”

Topper stared at him, unimpressed.

Block leaned closer, lowering his voice. “And because people need to see a Harley in the sky again. They need to see you do it right. It’ll… settle things.”

Topper felt a coldness in his stomach. “So I’m a symbol.”

Block straightened, his medals catching the light. “We’re all symbols, son. Some of us just don’t know what for.”

Topper looked at the stack of forms, at the chained pen, at the dying plant. He imagined himself back in the cockpit, hands on the controls, the world narrowing to instruments and horizon.

He imagined the whispers.

He imagined his father’s grin in the photograph.

He imagined, too, the possibility—thin as a thread—that he could fly so cleanly, so perfectly, that the story would change. That the name could be something other than a punchline.

Block clapped him on the shoulder again, gentler this time. “Get some rest. Briefing in an hour.”

He left, and the door clicked shut.

Topper stood alone in the office. The hum of the air-conditioning filled the silence, a mechanical imitation of wind.

He walked to the desk and sat down. The chair squeaked in protest. He pulled the WELCOME BACK form toward him and stared at the blank line where his signature was supposed to go.

His hand hovered over the pen.

For a moment, he hesitated—not because he didn’t know how to write his name, but because writing it felt like claiming it. Owning it. Inviting all the baggage that came with it.

Then he picked up the pen and signed.

TOPPER HARLEY.

The letters looked bold and slightly crooked. Human.

He set the pen down and leaned back, exhaling slowly.

Outside the window, another jet roared down the runway and lifted into the sky, climbing with effortless arrogance. Topper watched until it became a speck, then nothing.

He told himself he was here for one reason: to clear his father’s name.

He did not yet admit the other reason, the quieter one: because some part of him missed the sky so much it hurt.

A knock sounded at the door.

Topper looked up. “Yeah?”

The door opened, and a young sergeant peeked in. “Captain Harley? Commander Block said to show you to medical for your evaluation.”

Topper frowned. “Evaluation?”

The sergeant nodded, earnest. “Standard procedure. Physical. Psychological. They just want to make sure you’re… you know… okay.”

Topper stared at him. “Do I look okay?”

The sergeant hesitated, then gave a small, apologetic shrug. “You look… like you could use a nap, sir.”

Topper stood. “Lead the way.”

He followed the sergeant down the hallway, past the posters and the polished floors, toward whatever new indignity waited.

As they walked, Topper felt the base closing around him like a familiar trap. He could already sense the shape of the days ahead: training, rivalries, briefings, jokes that were knives in disguise.

And somewhere in all of it, the mission.

War, dressed up as purpose.

He kept walking anyway.

Because a Harley, he reminded himself, did not run forever.

Even if he wanted to.

### Chapter 2 — A Commander with a Talent for Disaster

The base had a name painted on a sign that looked like it had survived three wars and one jealous ex-wife. The letters were proud but chipped, as if even the alphabet had been through basic training. Beyond it: runway, hangars, wind-socked emptiness, and the constant, animal-throated sound of jets inhaling the sky.

Topper Harley arrived in a government jeep that smelled of vinyl, stale coffee, and decisions made too quickly. The driver—an airman with a face like a polite shovel—kept glancing at Topper as if he expected him to start yodeling, or confessing, or biting.

“Almost there,” the airman said, though they were already under the shadow of a control tower.

Topper watched the tower slide past. Glass windows like dark sunglasses. People inside moving like fish behind an aquarium wall. He felt the old sensation: the base as a living thing, indifferent and hungry. It didn’t remember you. It only measured you.

They stopped near a row of hangars. The airman hopped out, hurried around to open Topper’s door with a formality that suggested either respect or a desire to keep both hands visible.

“Welcome back, sir.”

Topper stepped onto the tarmac. Heat came up through his boots. The wind smelled of kerosene and sunbaked rubber. Somewhere, a jet spooled up, and the sound went straight into his ribs like a fist.

A small crowd had formed, which was never a good sign. In the center stood a man in a crisp uniform and an expression of sturdy optimism, as if he believed gravity was a rumor started by the Navy.

“Topper Harley!” the man boomed.

The man was Commander Block.

Block moved forward with his arms wide, as if he intended to hug Topper, or arrest him, or sell him a used car. He had the kind of face that could look heroic on a poster from a distance, but up close it revealed details that did not belong in heroism: a nose that had been broken and reassembled without instructions, a grin that appeared at inappropriate times, and eyes that wandered slightly as if searching for the rest of his thoughts.

“Sir,” Topper said, and tried to keep his voice level.

Block seized Topper’s hand in a handshake that began as a greeting and became a wrestling match. He pumped once, twice, ten times, as if trying to start a stubborn lawnmower.

“Good grip,” Block said, nodding with satisfaction. “That’s important in aviation. Grip. And… altitude. Both of those.”

“Yes, sir.”

Block leaned in conspiratorially. “I’ll be honest with you, Harley. The brass is nervous. They say you’re… unpredictable.”

Topper stared at him.

Block tapped his own temple. “But I say unpredictability is just predictability wearing a fake mustache.”

He straightened and shouted over his shoulder, “Men! Gather round! This is Topper Harley, the man, the myth, the lawsuit!”

A few pilots stepped closer. Their flight suits were zipped with the casual confidence of people who had never had to zip anything under pressure. They looked Topper up and down the way mechanics look at a dent: with curiosity, contempt, and the faint hope they won’t be the one stuck fixing it.

One of them—tall, square-jawed, and gleaming with smugness—smiled like he’d practiced in a mirror until it hurt.

“Harley,” he said. “Heard you were… retired.”

Topper recognized the tone. Not a question. A diagnosis.

“Temporarily,” Topper said.

The pilot’s smile widened. “We’ll see how temporary. I’m Kent Gregory.”

Topper nodded once. Kent Gregory. The name carried itself like it had its own theme music.

Block clapped his hands. “Excellent! Everyone’s meeting everyone. That’s what war is about. Camaraderie. Trust. And not leaving your lunch in the microwave because then it smells like fish.”

He gestured grandly, and his elbow struck the side mirror of a nearby jeep. The mirror snapped inward with a crisp *clack*. Block didn’t notice.

“Come,” he said. “I’ll show you the squadron.”

They walked. Topper fell into step beside Block, who marched with a kind of cheerful incompetence. Every few paces, Block’s sleeve brushed something it shouldn’t—an antenna, a dangling cable, a cart handle—and each time, something wobbled as if deciding whether to forgive him.

Topper kept his eyes forward. He could feel the stares. He could feel the story traveling ahead of him like a rumor with wings: *Harley’s back. Harley, the screwup’s son. Harley, the guy who might get you killed.*

Block talked as they walked, words spilling out with the unfiltered abundance of a man whose mouth had never been introduced to restraint.

“We’ve got the best equipment, Harley. The best planes. The best men.” He pointed at a group of airmen struggling to roll a large crate down a ramp. The crate tilted dangerously. “And the best… teamwork. Look at that. Like ants.”

The crate slipped. The airmen yelped. A corner hit the tarmac with a heavy thud, and something inside it made a sound like a disappointed cow.

Block nodded approvingly. “Strong crate,” he said.

Topper glanced at him. “Sir, what’s in that?”

Block squinted at the label. “Uh… ‘Do Not Drop.’”

He brightened. “Well, they didn’t drop it. They… placed it aggressively.”

They reached a wide concrete apron where two jets sat like crouched predators, noses pointed toward the runway. Crew members moved around them with practiced speed. A mechanic waved at Block, then immediately looked away as if worried the wave had been contagious.

Block waved back enthusiastically. His hand caught the edge of a clipboard someone was holding. The clipboard flew up, spun, and slapped a technician in the forehead. The technician blinked, stunned, then looked around for someone to blame. Block had already moved on.

Topper began to understand. Block wasn’t merely accident-prone. He was an accident with rank.

They entered the operations building, where the air-conditioning hit like a slap. The hallway was lined with framed photographs: pilots smiling beside jets, pilots shaking hands with officials, pilots standing in front of flags that looked freshly ironed. The faces were all variations of the same expression: *We are brave, we are handsome, and we have never spilled anything on ourselves.*

Topper’s own father’s photograph hung among them, older and more faded. A younger man’s grin. A younger man’s eyes. The resemblance was a quiet insult.

Topper felt something in his chest tighten. He looked away.

Block stopped in front of the photo and saluted, though his salute was slightly off, like he was trying to swat a fly near his eyebrow.

“Good man,” Block said. “Your dad. Hell of a pilot. Hell of a… man.”

Topper said nothing.

Block continued, apparently oblivious to silence. “Of course, there were… complications.”

Topper’s jaw clenched.

Block leaned closer again, voice dropping to a whisper that still carried down the hallway. “Between you and me, Harley, I don’t believe half the things people say. I only believe the *good* half.”

Topper exhaled through his nose. “Thank you, sir.”

Block nodded as if he’d just solved a moral puzzle. Then he slapped Topper on the back—hard enough to knock him forward a step.

“Now!” Block said brightly. “Let’s get you briefed. We’ve got a mission. We’ve got targets. We’ve got a budget that would make a senator cry. And we’ve got a new training program designed by the finest minds in the Pentagon and one guy we found outside a bowling alley.”

They entered the briefing room.

It was a long room with rows of seats and a giant screen at the front. The screen was down, but the projector was on, casting a bright rectangle of light onto the blank surface like a stage waiting for actors. A large map covered one wall, with colored pins and string lines connecting them in what looked like either strategy or a craft project.

Several pilots were already seated, lounging as if they were in a theater waiting for a comedy. A few turned as Topper entered. Some nodded. Some smirked. One made a quiet sound that might have been admiration or indigestion.

Kent Gregory sat in the front row, legs stretched out, hands folded behind his head. He looked like he’d been born in a flight suit and had never once doubted himself.

Block strode to the front of the room and cleared his throat.

The microphone squealed.

Block flinched, then leaned into it with the confidence of a man who believed volume was a substitute for clarity.

“Gentlemen!” he announced. “And… other gentlemen! We are here today because our nation needs us.”

He pointed at the map. His finger landed on a pin and knocked it loose. The pin fell, rolled, and disappeared under a chair.

Block stared at the empty spot. “That was… enemy headquarters,” he said quickly. “We’ve destroyed it.”

A few pilots chuckled.

Topper took a seat near the middle. He could feel the room’s energy: restless, competitive, hungry. These were men who lived for speed and applause. They were also men who would laugh at your funeral if the eulogy had a good punchline.

Block continued, “Our mission—Operation Sleepy Weasel—will require precision, courage, and… a willingness to do paperwork.”

Groans.

Block held up a hand. “I know, I know. But paperwork is the backbone of freedom.”

He clicked a remote.

The screen flickered to life.

For a moment, an image appeared: a tropical beach with palm trees and a couple holding hands. Then it changed to a cooking show. Then to a black-and-white clip of a man tap-dancing. Then, finally, to a grainy satellite photo of a desert region.

Block frowned at the projector. “We’re having a little trouble with the… film strip.”

A technician at the back whispered, “Sir, it’s digital.”

Block nodded solemnly. “Right. Digital film strip.”

The pilots snickered again. Kent Gregory’s laughter was the loudest, the kind that invited others to join, not because it was funny, but because it was safe to laugh with him.

Topper watched Kent. He watched the way Kent owned the room without trying. He watched the way other men adjusted their posture when Kent laughed, as if laughter was a ranking system.

Block pointed at the satellite image, which was now upside down.

“Here,” Block said, tapping a spot that might have been a mountain or might have been a shadow. “The enemy has built a secret installation. We believe it contains… weapons. Possibly nuclear. Possibly… regular. Either way, we don’t want it.”

He tapped again. The screen wobbled. The projector made a noise like a dying vacuum cleaner.

Topper raised a hand slightly. “Sir, the image is inverted.”

Block stared at it, then at Topper. “Inverted?”

“Yes, sir. It’s upside down.”

Block nodded slowly, as if Topper had just explained a complicated philosophical concept. Then he turned to the technician. “Fix it.”

The technician pressed a button. The image flipped right-side up.

Block smiled triumphantly. “There. Now we can all see it correctly. Thank you, Harley. That’s why we brought you back. Your… attention to detail.”

Kent Gregory leaned back and muttered loud enough for the row to hear, “He’s good at flipping things. Like his dad flipped out.”

A few pilots laughed. The laughter was quick, like a gunshot, and then it died, leaving a thin silence behind it.

Topper’s hands tightened on the edge of his seat. His face stayed calm. He’d learned that much. Anger in a room like this was blood in water.

Block, oblivious, barreled on. “We’ll be flying low. Very low. The kind of low where you can see what the enemy had for breakfast.”

Someone in the back called, “What if they had waffles?”

Block nodded. “Then you’ll see waffles.”

More laughter.

Topper felt the laughter tug at him, trying to pull him into it, to make him part of the pack. He didn’t move. He sat still, and the stillness made him feel heavier than the chair.

Block clicked again, and a diagram appeared: a jet silhouette with arrows and labels. Half the labels were spelled wrong. One arrow pointed to the tail and said *FRONT*.

Block gestured at it confidently. “This is your aircraft. You will fly it. You will love it. You will treat it like a… like a loyal dog.”

He paused. “Not like a cat. Cats don’t listen.”

The diagram changed again. Now it showed a series of flight paths. The lines crisscrossed like someone had drawn them during an earthquake.

Block pointed with a stick he had apparently found somewhere. He jabbed at the screen so hard the image shook.

“Harley,” he said, “you’ll be leading the first strike.”

Topper’s head lifted slightly. A ripple moved through the room. Kent Gregory’s eyebrows rose, just a fraction, then settled into a look of amused disbelief.

Topper said, “Yes, sir.”

Kent spoke up. “Sir, with respect—”

Block held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say, Gregory. ‘Why Harley?’”

Kent’s mouth twitched. “Yes, sir.”

Block smiled. “Because he’s got something you don’t.”

Kent’s smile returned, sharp. “What’s that, sir?”

Block leaned forward as if delivering a secret. “A cabin.”

The room laughed. Block laughed too, delighted with himself. Topper did not laugh. He wasn’t sure if the joke was on him or simply near him.

Block clapped his hands again. “All right! Dismissed! Go train! Go sweat! Go do whatever it is you do to feel like men!”

The pilots stood, stretching, talking, already turning the briefing into gossip. Kent Gregory rose and turned toward Topper, moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who expected the world to step aside.

He stopped beside Topper’s seat. “Harley,” he said, voice low. “Don’t take it personally.”

Topper looked up at him. “What?”

Kent shrugged. “The jokes. The whispers. The… history.” He smiled, and the smile was almost friendly, if you ignored the teeth. “We just like to know who we’re flying with.”

Topper stood. He was slightly shorter than Kent, but he didn’t lean back. He didn’t lean forward. He held his ground.

“You’ll know,” Topper said.

Kent’s eyes flicked over Topper’s face, searching for cracks. “I hope so. Because out there…” He nodded toward the runway visible through a window. “It’s not about family names. It’s about who keeps their head.”

Topper’s voice stayed even. “I’ll keep mine.”

Kent patted Topper’s shoulder, a gesture that pretended to be camaraderie and landed as warning. “Good,” he said. “Try not to lose anyone else’s.”

He walked away.

Topper watched him go. He felt the old familiar itch under his skin: the need to prove himself, the need to punch something, the need to disappear. He swallowed it down. He’d swallowed worse.

Outside, the sun had shifted. The air shimmered over the runway. The base had resumed its rhythm: engines, footsteps, shouted orders, distant laughter.

Block approached again, carrying a stack of folders. The folders were labeled in thick black marker: *TOP SECRET*. One folder was upside down. Another was clearly a menu from the cafeteria.

“Harley!” Block called. “There you are. I lost you.”

Topper stared at him. “Sir, I was right behind you.”

Block nodded. “Exactly. That’s how they get you.”

He handed Topper a folder. “Your file. Medical, psychological, dental—everything. Read it. Know yourself.”

Topper opened it. The first page was a photocopy of a dog.

He flipped it. The next page was a recipe for chili.

He looked up. “Sir—”

Block waved a hand. “Ah, yes. The Pentagon’s new paperless system. It’s very efficient. Sometimes it pulls the wrong things. But the important stuff is in there somewhere.”

Topper closed the folder carefully, as if it might explode.

Block smiled. “Now, I want you to meet the men. Let them see you. Let them smell you.”

Topper blinked. “Sir?”

Block nodded. “Metaphorically.”

They walked toward the flight line, where pilots were gathering for training. A group stood near a jet, listening to an instructor with a sunburned neck and a voice like sandpaper.

Block stepped forward and raised his arms again. “Men! This is Harley! He’s back!”

The instructor paused mid-sentence. The pilots turned.

Topper stood in front of them, feeling the weight of their attention. Some faces were curious. Some hostile. Some indifferent. One man looked like he was trying to remember whether he’d left his stove on.

The instructor said, “Harley. Heard about you.”

Topper nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The instructor pointed at the jet. “You’ll be flying that.”

Topper looked at it. The aircraft was sleek, lethal, and expensive. It looked like it could slice through the sky and through a man’s confidence with equal ease.

The instructor continued, “We’re going to start with basic maneuvers. Then we’ll move to dogfighting. Then we’ll move to live-fire exercises.”

Block interrupted, “And then we’ll move to lunch.”

The instructor stared at Block. “Sir, lunch is at twelve hundred.”

Block checked his watch. His watch was upside down.

“Then we’ll move to lunch *eventually*,” Block said, satisfied.

Training began.

They strapped into jets, climbed ladders, checked instruments. Topper moved through the motions with muscle memory. His hands knew the switches, the dials, the harness. His mind, however, was a different animal. It kept darting toward old images: his father’s face, the crash, the whispers that followed.

He climbed into the cockpit. The canopy closed over him, sealing him into a glass bubble. The world became smaller and louder.

The radio crackled.

“Harley,” the instructor’s voice came through. “You ready?”

Topper swallowed. “Ready.”

“Taxi to runway.”

Topper eased the jet forward. The plane moved like a living thing, heavy and eager. He followed the painted lines, feeling the eyes of ground crew tracking him.

To his left, Kent Gregory taxied alongside, matching speed with effortless ease. Kent’s voice came over the radio, smooth as oil.

“Try not to scratch the paint, Harley.”

Topper didn’t answer. He kept his gaze forward.

Block’s voice burst into the channel. “All pilots, this is Commander Block. Remember: the runway is the long, flat thing. Do not take off from the grass. The grass is not a runway. We learned that.”

A pause.

Block added, quieter, “Some of us learned that.”

Topper’s lips twitched despite himself. It was a tiny crack in his armor, and he hated that it felt good.

They reached the runway threshold. The instructor’s voice came again, all business. “Harley, you’re first. Full power. Rotate at one-fifty. Climb to angels ten.”

Topper’s hand tightened on the throttle. He pushed it forward.

The jet roared. The acceleration pressed him back into the seat. The runway blurred beneath him. The sound filled his skull until it felt like thought itself was being drowned.

At one-fifty, he pulled back gently. The nose lifted. The ground fell away.

For a moment, there was nothing but sky.

Topper’s chest loosened. The air always did this to him: it took the weight off, even as it demanded everything.

He climbed. The base shrank below, a neat arrangement of concrete and metal. The world became a map again, but this time the map made sense.

Kent’s jet rose beside him. Another jet joined. Then another. Formation.

The instructor guided them through maneuvers. Turns, climbs, dives. Topper followed, precise. His hands were steady. His mind, for once, was quiet.

Then the instructor said, “All right. Dogfight training. Pair up.”

Topper’s stomach tightened.

Kent’s voice came over the radio. “I’ll take Harley.”

There was a pause, the kind that carries meaning.

The instructor replied, “Fine. Gregory and Harley. The rest of you—pair up.”

Topper heard the unspoken: *Let’s see what the legend does.*

They broke formation. The sky opened around them. Topper rolled his jet, searching for Kent’s position.

Kent was above him, already turning in, diving like a hawk.

Topper reacted instinctively, pulling into a hard turn, feeling G-forces crush him. The world tilted. The horizon spun. His vision narrowed.

Kent’s jet sliced past, close enough that Topper could see the flash of sunlight on the canopy.

Kent’s voice, calm: “Too slow.”

Topper gritted his teeth. He pushed the throttle, climbed, rolled. He tried to anticipate Kent’s move, to think like him.

Kent was always where he wasn’t supposed to be.

They circled, dove, climbed. The sky became a chessboard at five hundred miles an hour.

Topper’s breathing grew shallow. Sweat gathered under his helmet. He felt the old panic creeping in—not fear of death, but fear of failure. Fear of being watched and judged and found exactly as broken as everyone said.

Kent’s jet appeared again, lining up behind him.

“Guns, guns,” Kent sang into the radio, the call that meant he had the shot.

Topper’s hands tightened. His father’s name flashed in his mind like a warning light.

*Harley.*

The word wasn’t spoken. It was remembered. It was accusation.

Topper jerked the stick too hard. The jet shuddered. Alarms chirped.

The instructor’s voice snapped in. “Harley, easy! You’re bleeding speed.”

Topper tried to correct, but his movements were jagged now, as if his body had forgotten how to be fluid. Kent stayed on him, patient, predatory.

“Come on,” Kent said softly. “Show me something.”

Topper’s vision tunneled further. The cockpit seemed smaller. The canopy seemed closer. He heard his own heartbeat louder than the engine.

Then—absurdly—he heard Block’s voice on the radio again.

“Harley,” Block said, sounding cheerful, “remember: if you ever get lost, just look for the big blue thing. That’s the sky. You’re in it.”

Topper blinked. The absurdity cut through the panic like cold water. His mind stuttered, then reset. The sky. Yes. The sky. Not his father. Not the whispers. Not Kent’s grin.

Just the sky.

Topper exhaled.

He loosened his grip. He let the jet fly instead of forcing it.

He rolled left, dropped altitude, then pulled up sharply, using the sun behind him. Kent followed, confident.

Topper waited until the last second, then cut throttle and kicked into a tight, controlled turn. Kent overshot, his momentum carrying him past.

Topper pushed throttle back in, rolled, and came up behind Kent.

For a heartbeat, Kent’s jet filled his view. Perfect alignment. Perfect shot.

Topper’s finger hovered near the trigger.

He didn’t fire. It was training, but the impulse felt real. He imagined headlines. He imagined his father’s face. He imagined being the man everyone expected him to be: reckless, cursed, dangerous.

He backed off.

The instructor’s voice came through, surprised. “Harley, you had him.”

Topper’s voice was steady. “I know.”

Kent’s jet peeled away, climbing. His voice was quieter now. “Why didn’t you take it?”

Topper watched him. “Because I’m not here to win a game.”

Kent didn’t answer. The silence between them was thick with things neither wanted to say.

They returned to formation and flew back to base. The landing was clean. Topper’s hands didn’t shake until the wheels touched down.

On the tarmac, pilots gathered again, buzzing with the story already forming: Harley almost had Gregory. Harley didn’t take the shot. Harley is either noble or stupid.

Kent climbed down from his jet and walked toward Topper as Topper removed his helmet. Kent’s face was unreadable, which on him looked like effort.

“You’re better than they said,” Kent admitted, as if it cost him.

Topper met his gaze. “They didn’t say much good.”

Kent’s mouth twitched. “No.”

He hesitated, then added, “But you’re still Harley.”

Topper nodded once. “Yeah.”

Kent walked away.

Block appeared, moving at a jog that suggested urgency, though his expression suggested he’d simply forgotten where he left something.

“Harley!” Block called. “Great flying! Great! I watched the whole thing.”

Topper wiped sweat from his brow. “Sir, you were on the radio.”

Block nodded. “Yes. I watched it on the radio.”

Topper stared.

Block continued, “Listen, I want you to know something. The men… they’re tough. They joke. They test. That’s how they show love.”

Topper’s voice was flat. “Is that what they’re doing?”

Block smiled warmly. “Mostly. Some of them are just jerks. But that’s also love, in a way.”

He reached out and adjusted something on Topper’s flight suit—straightening a patch, or maybe just patting him. His hand caught Topper’s zipper and pulled it down an inch.

Block didn’t notice.

He pointed toward the operations building. “Come. I’ll show you your quarters.”

They walked again. Topper felt the day settling into him: the noise, the heat, the stares, the flight. He felt the thin thread of confidence he’d regained in the air. He also felt how easily it could be cut.

As they passed the row of framed photos again, Topper glanced at his father’s picture. The grin. The bright eyes. The man frozen in time before the crash, before the rumors, before the name became a bruise.

Block followed his gaze. His voice softened, briefly turning almost competent.

“Your dad…” Block said, then paused. “He made mistakes. We all do. The difference is, some mistakes get written down.”

Topper looked at Block, surprised by the hint of truth.

Block nodded, as if he’d delivered something profound. Then his foot caught on a loose tile, and he stumbled forward into a water cooler. The cooler tipped. Water gushed out, soaking the floor.

Block flailed, trying to catch it, and in doing so knocked over a mop bucket. The bucket rolled, hit a door, and the door swung open, revealing a room full of officers in the middle of a serious meeting.

Everyone stared as water spread across the hallway like an invading army.

Block straightened, drenched, and saluted the officers.

“Gentlemen!” he said brightly. “Just testing the… sprinkler system.”

The officers said nothing. One of them blinked slowly, as if trying to wake from a nightmare.

Topper stood beside Block, water soaking his boots, and for the first time since he’d returned, he felt something dangerously close to laughter. Not the cruel laughter of the pilots. Not the nervous laughter of the briefing room. Something else. Something human.

Block looked at him, pleased. “See?” Block said. “We’re already making progress.”

Topper shook his head. “Yes, sir.”

They continued down the hall, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind them like evidence.

Outside, jets screamed overhead, practicing for a war that might not care about jokes or family names. But inside the base, in the dripping hallway, Topper Harley stood in the middle of absurdity and felt, briefly, that he might survive it.

And then Block, still walking, said casually, “Oh, by the way, Harley—try not to die. It’s hell on the paperwork.”

Topper stared at him.

Block smiled. “That’s love.”

Valerie arrived on a Tuesday that couldn’t decide what kind of day it wanted to be.

The morning began with a fog so thick it looked poured, as if the sky had been ladled from a pot and left to cool over the runway. Then the sun broke through in bright, indecent patches, like a spotlight searching for someone who owed money. Men in flight suits drifted across the tarmac with coffee and bravado, their laughter hanging in the air a little too long, the way laughter does when it’s meant to prove something.

Topper Harley stood off to one side, hands in his pockets, watching the base wake up. He’d been back long enough to know where the important buildings were and not long enough to feel like any of them belonged to him. The hangars were huge and hollow, the kind of spaces that made your footsteps sound like accusations. Every so often a jet would cough itself awake and the sound would punch him in the chest, not painful exactly, but intimate—like a memory that had learned how to wear steel.

He told himself he was fine. He told himself a lot of things.

A maintenance crew rolled a cart past him stacked with orange cones and a coiled hose. The hose’s metal coupling clicked against the cart’s edge, a small, neat sound. Topper flinched anyway, then pretended he hadn’t by looking sternly at the horizon, as if he’d been studying weather patterns and not his own nerves.

“Harley!”

The voice came from behind, brisk and pleased with itself. Commander Block approached with the loose-limbed confidence of a man who had never met a staircase he couldn’t misjudge. He wore his uniform like a costume that had been tailored for somebody else and then aggressively pinned to him. His chest was a museum of ribbons. His face was sun-browned, his smile wide, his eyes—Topper noticed again—had the cheerful vacancy of a dog watching a magic trick.

“Topper,” Block said, and clapped him on the shoulder with enough force to adjust Topper’s spine. “Got someone you need to meet. Real asset. Brilliant. Civilian. Which means she’s either a genius or a spy, and we’re going to assume genius until she steals something.”

Topper opened his mouth to respond and Block kept going, words spilling like marbles down a hallway.

“She’s here to optimize performance. Performance! That’s what we do, right? We perform. We perform courage, we perform discipline, we perform—” Block’s gaze drifted to a passing forklift and he saluted it reflexively. The forklift did not salute back. “Anyway. Follow me.”

Block turned sharply and began walking toward the administrative building. Topper followed, because that was what you did in the military when a superior officer led you somewhere with the enthusiasm of a man who had just remembered he owned a map.

They passed a group of pilots lounging near the hangar doors. One of them flicked a cigarette into a coffee cup and missed. Another tried to lean casually against a barrel and discovered it was not anchored. It rolled, slowly at first, then with gathering confidence, taking him with it. The others laughed. The laughter had edges.

Topper felt their eyes on him. He could almost hear what they were thinking, because he’d heard it before in different mouths: Harley. The name that landed like a dropped wrench. The name that meant “watch him.” The name that meant “his father.” The name that meant, if you were cruel enough, “coward.”

He swallowed it all, the way you swallowed bad medicine. He had come back for a reason. He reminded himself of that. He had a mission, and it wasn’t only the one written on the briefing boards.

Block led him into the administrative building, a place that smelled of paper, floor polish, and anxiety. A ceiling fan turned with the weary patience of an old man stirring soup. Somewhere a phone rang and kept ringing, as if it had been abandoned mid-emergency.

They reached a door with a frosted glass panel that read: PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION / SPECIAL CONSULTANT.

Block knocked, then immediately opened the door without waiting, as if the knocking had been more of a courtesy to the concept of privacy than to the person inside.

“Doctor!” Block announced.

Inside, the office was tidy in the way of someone who was either disciplined or trying very hard not to fall apart. A stack of folders sat squared on the desk. A clipboard lay precisely aligned with the edge. A small potted plant leaned toward the window as if it were eavesdropping on sunlight.

Valerie turned from the desk when they entered.

She was not what Topper expected, though he realized a second later he hadn’t known what he expected. Someone older, maybe, with a lab coat and a severe expression. Someone who spoke in acronyms and smelled faintly of antiseptic. Someone who would look at him like a problem.

Valerie looked at him like a person.

She was in her late twenties or early thirties, hair dark and pulled back loosely, the kind of style that suggested she had better things to do than fight with it. Her eyes were calm, observant, and amused in a quiet way, like she’d seen enough chaos to stop being impressed by it. She wore civilian clothes—simple, practical—but there was something about the way she stood that reminded Topper of pilots: centered, ready, aware of her own balance.

“Commander Block,” she said, voice warm and even. “I was told you’d be bringing Lieutenant Harley.”

Block beamed. “I did! I am! Here he is. One Harley. Freshly delivered. Still in the packaging.”

Topper stepped forward, offered his hand. “Doctor…?”

“Valerie,” she said, and took his hand. Her grip was firm without being competitive. “Just Valerie. Titles make people act strange.”

Block laughed, then immediately coughed as if he’d swallowed his own laughter wrong. “Well, we can’t have that,” he said. “Strange acting. Not on my base.” He winked at Topper, then at Valerie, then at the potted plant. The plant did not respond. Block’s smile faltered for half a second, then recovered. “I’ll leave you two to it. Talk. Optimize. Perform.”

He backed out of the office, still talking as he went. “If you need anything, I’m in my—my—” He paused, eyes narrowing as if the building had rearranged itself. “I’m somewhere.”

The door clicked shut.

Silence settled, not awkward, just present.

Valerie released Topper’s hand and gestured to a chair. “Please. Sit.”

Topper sat, then realized he’d chosen the chair directly in front of her desk like a student called in to explain himself. He shifted slightly, trying to look casual. The chair squeaked. He froze, as if the chair had betrayed him.

Valerie sat across from him, opened a folder. “I’ve reviewed your file,” she said.

Topper’s stomach tightened. Files were where people put versions of you they could control. “And?”

“And it’s…interesting,” Valerie said. She glanced up at him. “There’s a lot of noise in it.”

Noise. That was one word for it.

Topper tried to smile. “Pilots make noise.”

“I don’t mean the jets,” she said. “I mean the commentary. The opinions. The rumors dressed up as facts.”

Topper felt heat crawl up his neck. “They like to talk.”

Valerie nodded, as if he’d confirmed a hypothesis. “They do. And the more uncertain they are, the louder they get.”

He didn’t know what to do with that, so he shrugged. “I’m here to fly.”

“And to survive,” Valerie said, flipping a page. “And to keep your squadron alive. Those things are connected.”

Topper looked at the folder, then away. Through the window he could see the runway, a strip of concrete that led to the sky like a dare.

Valerie set the folder down gently, as if she didn’t want the paper to feel judged. “Commander Block wants me to ‘optimize performance,’” she said, making the phrase sound slightly ridiculous, which it was. “But what he really wants is to stop losing pilots. He wants confidence. He wants results. And he wants them yesterday.”

Topper’s mouth twitched. “That’s the military.”

Valerie leaned forward a little. “And what do you want, Lieutenant Harley?”

The question landed with unexpected weight. It wasn’t accusatory. It wasn’t even probing. It was just…direct, like a clean line drawn in the air.

Topper’s first instinct was to answer with something safe. To say, I want to serve. I want to do my duty. I want to fly. Those were all true in the way slogans were true.

But Valerie’s gaze held him in place. He could feel the old anger under his ribs, the old shame around his throat.

“I want,” he began, then stopped, because the words felt too big.

Valerie waited. She didn’t fill the silence. She didn’t rescue him. She simply let the space exist, like a runway you had to commit to.

Topper exhaled. “I want them to stop saying my father died a coward.”

Valerie’s expression softened, not with pity but with recognition. “That’s a heavy thing to carry into a cockpit.”

Topper’s jaw tightened. “I can handle it.”

“I’m sure you can,” Valerie said. “But handling isn’t the same as healing.”

He looked at her sharply. “You a therapist?”

“No,” she said. “I’m a doctor. Different kind of trouble.”

Topper waited for her to explain, but instead she opened a drawer and pulled out a stethoscope. It looked absurdly ordinary in her hands, as if she’d stolen it from a hospital and brought it here as proof she belonged.

“Routine assessment,” she said. “Commander’s orders.”

Topper nodded, stood, then hesitated. The last time someone had listened to his heart, it had been in a room that smelled like disinfectant and grief. He pushed the memory down.

Valerie moved around the desk, professional now, and placed the stethoscope’s cold diaphragm against his chest. Her fingers were cool. Her touch was careful.

“Breathe,” she said.

Topper inhaled. The office felt too small suddenly, filled with the sound of his lungs and the faint whir of the ceiling fan.

Valerie listened, shifted the stethoscope slightly. “Again.”

He breathed again. His heartbeat thudded under her hand, steady but insistent, like it was trying to get his attention.

Valerie’s brow furrowed a fraction. “You hold tension here,” she said, tapping lightly near his sternum. “Like you’re bracing for impact.”

Topper gave a short laugh. “In my line of work, impact happens.”

“Not always,” she said, and stepped back. She wrote something on her clipboard. “Sit.”

He sat again.

Valerie’s stomach growled.

It wasn’t the polite little sound people made when they skipped breakfast. It was a long, resonant rumble, low and rolling, like distant thunder moving across a plain. It seemed to have shape. It seemed to have intention. It lasted long enough that Topper had time to wonder if the building was settling.

Valerie didn’t react at first, as if she hadn’t heard it. Then, when it ended, she cleared her throat with the faintest hint of embarrassment.

Topper stared at her.

Valerie looked at him steadily. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t make the face,” she said.

“I’m not making a face.”

“You are,” she said. “Everyone does. Like they’ve just heard an animal speak.”

Topper tried to smooth his expression, failed, then gave up. “What was that?”

Valerie’s mouth twitched. “My stomach.”

Topper blinked. “Your stomach…does that?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s unusually talented.”

He didn’t know whether to laugh. The sound had been so dramatic it felt like it deserved applause. “Is that…medically concerning?”

Valerie sat back, folded her hands. “It’s fine. It’s been evaluated. It’s been imaged. It’s been discussed at conferences by people who should have better hobbies.”

Topper couldn’t help it. A laugh escaped him, quick and surprised, and for a second it felt like a door opening in a room he’d kept locked. “So you’re famous.”

“In a very small, very strange circle,” Valerie said. “I once had a gastroenterologist ask for my autograph.”

Topper laughed again, a little bigger. It startled him. He hadn’t laughed like that in a long time—without bitterness, without performance.

Valerie watched him as if she’d done something useful without meaning to. “There,” she said softly. “That’s better.”

“What’s better?”

“Your shoulders dropped,” Valerie said. “You’re not bracing right now.”

Topper looked down, realized she was right. His body had loosened without permission. He didn’t like that she could see it, and he liked it too.

He cleared his throat. “So what exactly are you doing here, Valerie? Besides…being a medical marvel.”

Valerie rolled her eyes lightly. “I’m here because the Air Force decided it’s cheaper to invest in pilots than to replace them.”

“That’s depressing.”

“It’s practical,” she corrected. “My job is to assess stress response, fatigue, decision-making under pressure. To identify patterns before they turn into funerals.”

Topper’s smile faded. Funerals. He’d been to enough to know the smell of flowers could become a kind of threat.

Valerie opened another folder, this one thinner. “I’m also here because Commander Block has a habit of confusing courage with invincibility,” she said. “And because your squadron has a habit of turning fear into jokes.”

Topper nodded slowly. “Jokes are lighter than fear.”

“Sometimes,” Valerie said. “Sometimes they’re just fear wearing a hat.”

Topper studied her. She spoke plainly, but there was something lyrical in the way she chose words, like she’d learned to be careful with them. He wondered where she’d learned that. Hospitals, maybe. Places where words mattered because they were often the last thing people heard.

Outside, a jet engine roared. The sound vibrated through the window glass. Topper’s muscles tensed automatically.

Valerie noticed. She didn’t comment. She simply waited until the sound faded, then said, “Tell me about your father.”

Topper’s throat tightened. He hadn’t expected her to go there so quickly. “You read the file.”

“I read what they wrote,” Valerie said. “That’s different from what happened.”

Topper stared at his hands. His fingers were calloused from training, from gripping controls, from trying to hold on. He flexed them, then stopped.

“My father,” he said slowly, “was a pilot. Like me. Better than me, probably. People said he was fearless.”

Valerie nodded, encouraging but not pushing.

“He died on a mission,” Topper continued. “Something went wrong. The official report says mechanical failure. But…people talk. They say he panicked. They say he ran. They say he—” His voice caught. He swallowed. “They say he got other men killed.”

Valerie’s stomach made a small, sympathetic gurgle, as if it were reacting to the tension in the room. Valerie ignored it with practiced dignity.

Topper’s mouth tightened. “And because he’s dead, he can’t defend himself. So the story just…sits there. Like a stain.”

Valerie leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “And you feel like you have to scrub it off.”

Topper looked up. “Yes.”

Valerie held his gaze. “Even if it scrubs you raw.”

Topper didn’t answer, because the answer was in his face.

Valerie sat back. “I’m not here to tell you how to feel,” she said. “But I am here to tell you something practical: carrying that much anger makes you predictable.”

Topper frowned. “Predictable?”

“Yes,” Valerie said. “Anger narrows your options. It makes you choose the same move over and over. In the air, predictability gets you killed.”

Topper’s jaw worked. “So what, I should just…let it go?”

Valerie shook her head. “No. I’m saying you should know when it’s flying the plane.”

Topper stared at her, and for a second he felt something like relief. Not because she’d solved anything—she hadn’t—but because she’d named it. The thing in him that grabbed the yoke when he wasn’t looking.

A knock sounded at the door, followed by the door opening without waiting. A young pilot leaned in, grinning like he’d been issued the grin in basic training.

“Hey, Doc,” he said. His gaze flicked to Topper. “Oh. Harley. Didn’t know you were…getting optimized.”

Valerie’s expression remained polite. “Lieutenant, this is a private assessment.”

The pilot ignored that. “Commander Block says we’re doing a morale thing tonight. Volleyball. Beach theme.” He said the last two words as if they were an achievement.

Topper blinked. “There’s a beach?”

The pilot shrugged. “There’s sand. Close enough.” He winked at Valerie. “You coming, Doc?”

Valerie’s smile sharpened a fraction. “No.”

The pilot lingered, as if waiting for her to change her mind out of sheer admiration. Valerie continued to stare at him. Finally he backed out, still grinning. “Suit yourself. Your stomach’s missing out.”

The door shut.

Topper sat there, a little stunned. “He said—”

“I heard,” Valerie said dryly.

Topper’s laugh came out before he could stop it. Valerie watched him, then sighed.

“This base,” she said, “is like a high school with missiles.”

Topper leaned back in his chair. “You’re not wrong.”

For a moment they simply sat, listening to the distant noise of the base: engines, voices, the occasional metallic clank of someone dropping something important.

Valerie closed the folder. “That’s enough for today,” she said. “I’ll schedule follow-ups.”

Topper stood. “So that’s it? You listen to my heart, insult my anger, and introduce me to your…gifted stomach?”

Valerie smiled. “That’s the first meeting, yes.”

Topper hesitated at the door. He didn’t want to leave. That surprised him more than anything. He’d expected to feel exposed, judged, dissected. Instead he felt…seen, maybe. Or at least not misread.

He turned back. “Valerie?”

“Yes?”

He searched for something smooth to say, found nothing. “Do you…eat lunch here?”

Valerie’s stomach answered with a short, eager growl.

Valerie closed her eyes briefly. “Apparently, yes.”

Topper grinned. “I know a place on base with the best coffee.”

Valerie opened her eyes. “Is that a medical recommendation?”

“It’s a survival technique,” Topper said.

Valerie stood, grabbed her coat. “All right, Lieutenant Harley. Show me this coffee. But if it’s terrible, I’m putting it in your file.”

They walked out together into the hallway. The air felt cooler there, the light harsher. A couple of pilots passed them and did double takes, not subtle about it. Topper felt the familiar itch of being watched, but it didn’t bite as hard with Valerie beside him.

The mess hall was a long, echoing room with rows of tables bolted to the floor and a smell that suggested someone had once described food to the cooks over a bad phone connection. A television in the corner played a soap opera at low volume. The subtitles were on, as if the base had decided it needed help understanding melodrama.

Topper led Valerie to the coffee station, which consisted of a dented metal urn and a stack of cups that looked like they’d survived several wars of their own.

He poured two cups. The coffee came out the color of regret.

Valerie took a sip, made a thoughtful face. “It tastes like it was filtered through a sock.”

Topper nodded. “That’s why it’s good. It builds character.”

Valerie’s stomach rumbled again, shorter this time, like a comment under its breath.

Topper laughed. “It agrees.”

Valerie gave him a look. “It doesn’t have opinions. It has…responses.”

Topper raised an eyebrow. “That sounded like an opinion.”

Valerie’s mouth twitched. “Don’t start.”

They found a table near the window. Outside, the runway stretched out, bright now under the sun. Jets moved like sleek animals. Men moved like they were trying to look like sleek animals.

Valerie stirred her coffee. “So,” she said, “what do you do when you’re not flying?”

Topper stared into his cup. The surface of the coffee trembled slightly, reflecting the overhead lights in broken lines. “I…don’t know,” he admitted. “I used to fish.”

Valerie looked up. “Used to?”

Topper shrugged. “Hard to fish when you’re thinking about…other things.”

Valerie nodded slowly. “Guilt is a greedy companion.”

Topper glanced at her. “You talk like you’ve met it.”

Valerie’s gaze drifted to the window. For a second her calm expression shifted, something distant passing through it like a shadow. “I have,” she said quietly. Then, as if she’d revealed enough, she added, “In my work, you see what happens when people don’t say what they’re carrying. It comes out anyway. In the body. In the voice. In the choices.”

Topper watched her. He realized she wasn’t just here because the Air Force wanted fewer funerals. She was here because she believed in preventing them. There was a difference.

A pilot walked by their table and slowed, looking Valerie up and down with theatrical interest. “Doc,” he said, “if you ever want to optimize my performance—”

Valerie didn’t look at him. “Keep walking.”

The pilot chuckled as if she were flirting. “Feisty.”

Topper felt irritation flare, quick and hot. He didn’t even like the guy, and yet the protectiveness rose in him like a reflex.

Before Topper could speak, Valerie’s stomach made a sound—sharp, startling, almost like a bark.

The pilot stopped, blinked. “Was that—”

Valerie finally looked at him, expression perfectly serene. “Yes.”

The pilot’s bravado faltered. “Uh.”

Valerie took a sip of coffee. The pilot backed away slowly, as if retreating from an unpredictable animal.

Topper stared at Valerie. “Did your stomach just…threaten him?”

Valerie’s eyes gleamed with restrained amusement. “It has excellent timing.”

Topper laughed, and this time the laughter didn’t feel like a crack in him. It felt like a seam being stitched.

They talked longer than either of them intended. It wasn’t deep, not at first. Valerie asked about flying, about the feeling of speed, about what the sky looked like when you were alone in it. Topper answered, surprised by how easily the words came when he wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He found himself describing clouds like landscapes, describing the way the world narrowed to instruments and instinct, describing the strange peace of being above everything that could touch you.

Valerie listened as if it mattered.

At some point, Topper realized he was smiling without thinking about it. He stopped, startled, then continued anyway.

When they finally stood to leave, the mess hall had emptied a little. The television now showed a commercial for laundry detergent, which felt like an insult to the room’s general level of grime.

Outside, the afternoon had warmed. The fog was gone. The sky was an open, indifferent blue.

They walked toward Valerie’s office. A group of pilots in the distance played something that might have been football or might have been an argument with props. Someone shouted. Someone fell. Someone cheered.

Valerie glanced at Topper. “They’re scared,” she said.

Topper frowned. “They look like idiots.”

“Both can be true,” Valerie said.

Topper looked at her. “Are you scared?”

Valerie considered. “I’m cautious,” she said. “Which is a polite way of saying yes.”

Topper nodded. “I’m scared too.”

Valerie’s gaze softened. “Good,” she said. “Fear is information. It’s the people who claim they don’t feel it who make the worst decisions.”

They reached her office door. Valerie paused, hand on the knob.

“Lieutenant Harley,” she said.

“Topper,” he corrected, surprised by his own boldness.

Valerie smiled slightly. “Topper. I’m going to be honest with you.”

He waited.

“I think you’re very good at flying,” she said. “And very bad at forgiving yourself.”

Topper swallowed. “Maybe I don’t deserve forgiveness.”

Valerie studied him, then shook her head. “That’s not a decision you get to make alone,” she said. “Not when it affects everyone who flies with you.”

Topper looked away, jaw tight. The old instinct to argue rose up. To defend his pain like it was property.

Valerie touched his arm lightly, a brief contact, not possessive. “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll talk again. We’ll work on it. You don’t have to do it all in one day.”

Topper met her eyes. The base noise seemed distant for a moment, as if the world had stepped back to give them room.

“Okay,” he said.

Valerie opened the door, then paused, as if remembering something. “And Topper?”

“Yeah?”

Valerie’s stomach rumbled, long and low, like a warning siren that had decided to become music.

Valerie sighed. “That means it’s time for dinner.”

Topper smiled, and this time he didn’t fight it. “Then I guess I’ll see you at the mess hall.”

Valerie’s lips curved. “If you bring me something that doesn’t taste like it was filtered through a sock, I might even let you live.”

Topper stepped back, saluted her playfully—an act that felt dangerously close to joy—and walked away down the hallway. Behind him, the base went on being loud and ridiculous and armed.

But for the first time since he’d returned, the noise didn’t feel like it was only outside him.

It felt, faintly, like possibility.

### Chapter 4 — Training Day, or How to Lose a Jet in Plain Sight

The morning began the way most mornings did on the base: with a siren that sounded like a wounded animal and a loudspeaker that spoke in the patient, disappointed tone of a man reading bad news to a goldfish.

“Attention all personnel,” the voice said. “This is a training day. Please remember: the enemy is imaginary, but your injuries don’t have to be.”

Topper Harley lay on his bunk staring at the ceiling tiles, each one a pale square of government regret. Somewhere above him a pipe knocked rhythmically, as if the building had a heartbeat and it was trying to warn him. He listened to it until it became the steady click of a cockpit switch in his mind, until the room smelled faintly of jet fuel though there wasn’t a drop of it inside.

He sat up. His flight suit hung over the chair like a tired person. He pulled it on, zipped it, and felt the familiar tightening at the throat—like the uniform itself was reminding him who he had to be.

Outside, the air was sharp and metallic. The runway stretched out like a promise nobody intended to keep. Men moved with the brisk confidence of people who believed in checklists, even if they never read them. Somewhere a mechanic shouted, “Who parked the forklift in the hangar?” and someone else answered, “It parked itself!”

Topper walked toward the briefing room, trying to keep his shoulders loose. He’d learned, in the months since he’d been dragged out of the woods and back into civilization, that tension traveled. It started in the jaw, then the neck, then it found its way into the hands. Hands were everything in a cockpit. Hands were the difference between flying and falling with style.

A pilot jogged past him carrying a helmet under one arm and a cup of coffee under the other. The coffee sloshed with every step.

“Morning, Harley!” the pilot called, cheerful as a game show host. “Ready to make history?”

Topper nodded, because that was the safe answer. History had teeth.

The briefing room was already filling up. It smelled like stale doughnuts and fresh ambition. The walls were decorated with maps that had been pinned and repinned so many times they looked like they’d survived their own war. A chalkboard stood at the front, and someone had written in large, confident letters:

TODAY’S OBJECTIVE: DON’T DIE

Underneath, in smaller handwriting, someone had added:

…AGAIN

Topper took a seat near the middle. Around him the squadron settled into their usual shapes: men who leaned back as if gravity were optional, men who leaned forward as if secrets might fall out of the air, men who sat perfectly still and blinked like lizards. A few glanced at Topper with that particular blend of curiosity and judgment that always came with his name.

Harley. The name that carried a story.

The door banged open and Commander Block strode in with the crisp energy of a man who had never met a corner he couldn’t walk into. He wore his uniform like a costume he’d borrowed from someone taller. Medals glittered on his chest, catching the fluorescent light in sharp little flashes, like tiny mirrors trying to escape.

He slapped a folder onto the table at the front. Papers burst out in a snowstorm of forms and diagrams and what might have been a grocery list.

Block stared down at the mess, then up at the room with bright confidence.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “today we train. Tomorrow we… train again. And the day after that—” he paused, as if the word had slipped behind a sofa cushion “—we do whatever it is we’re doing out there.”

A hand went up. “Sir, are we deploying this week?”

Block smiled. “Absolutely. Unless we don’t. Either way, be ready.”

He turned to the chalkboard, picked up a pointer, and immediately snapped it in half.

Without missing a beat, he held up the broken pieces like a magician who’d meant to do it.

“Two-point plan,” he said. “First point: fly. Second point: come back. Questions?”

There were always questions. They were just rarely asked.

Block began the briefing. He spoke about enemy radar, about flight patterns, about the importance of teamwork. He used a lot of words that sounded like they belonged in a manual. The problem was that his sentences tended to wander. Halfway through describing a tactical maneuver, he drifted into a story about a fishing trip and didn’t seem to notice.

“…and that’s why,” he concluded, “you never trust a trout.”

A pilot in the back whispered, “Did he just compare surface-to-air missiles to fish?”

Another whispered back, “No. He compared fish to missiles. It’s worse.”

Topper watched the chalkboard, not the commander. The words DON’T DIE stared back at him like an old friend who’d become a critic.

Then the smug ace—everyone called him Kent, though he looked like he’d been born with a nickname and a mirror—shifted in his seat and spoke loud enough for the room.

“Some of us might have trouble with point two,” Kent said, eyes sliding toward Topper. “Coming back. Runs in the family.”

The room went quiet in that quick, practiced way that said: we heard it, we’re pretending we didn’t, and we’re going to enjoy it later.

Topper felt heat rise in his face, but he kept his expression steady. He’d learned that anger was a kind of fuel too. Dangerous, if you didn’t control it.

Block blinked at Kent as if trying to translate.

“Family?” Block said. “Ah yes. Family. Always important. My family once owned a chain of—” he paused again “—of… family businesses.”

A few pilots stared at their notebooks like they might contain escape routes.

Topper breathed out slowly. He could have said something. He could have thrown a line back, something sharp and clever. But sharp and clever had never saved anyone in the air.

The briefing ended the way it always ended: with Block saluting the room, turning too quickly, and knocking his elbow into the projector. The projector fell off the table, hit the floor, and began to play the last slide upside down on the ceiling.

The slide read: GOOD LUCK

Someone clapped politely. Someone else muttered, “We’ll need it.”

They filed out toward the hangars.

Outside, the sun had climbed higher, bleaching the tarmac until it looked like bone. Jets sat in rows, sleek and indifferent. Ground crews moved around them like ants around sleeping beasts. The engines were quiet for now, but the silence had a pressure to it, as if the air itself was holding its breath.

Topper walked toward his aircraft. A mechanic waved him over, wiping hands on a rag that had long ago given up any hope of cleanliness.

“Morning, Captain,” the mechanic said. “She’s ready.”

Topper ran a hand along the fuselage. The metal was cool, smooth, almost comforting. He climbed the ladder, settled into the cockpit, and began the familiar ritual: switches, dials, checks. The world narrowed to instruments and numbers, to the small, reliable truths inside the panel.

Then he smelled something.

It wasn’t fuel. It wasn’t oil. It was… cinnamon.

He frowned. He looked down. There, wedged near the throttle, was a small paper packet labeled:

CINNAMON — FOR COFFEE

He held it up between two fingers like it might be explosive.

“Hey!” he shouted down to the mechanic. “Why is there cinnamon in my cockpit?”

The mechanic squinted. “Cinnamon? That’s new. We’re trying to improve morale. The colonel said the jets should feel more… homey.”

Topper stared at him. “Homey?”

The mechanic nodded. “You know. Like your mom’s kitchen. Except faster.”

Topper stuffed the packet into a side compartment. “If my mom’s kitchen ever goes supersonic, I’ll let you know.”

He put on his helmet. The world muffled. His breath sounded loud in his ears. The radio crackled to life with voices, some clear, some distorted, all of them too casual for the amount of metal and fire they were about to trust.

“Tower, this is Viper Two requesting clearance.”

“Clearance granted. And for the love of God, stop calling yourself Viper Two. You’re not a snake.”

Laughter on the line.

Topper keyed his mic. “Tower, this is Harley. Ready.”

A pause. Then: “Harley, you’re cleared. Try not to redecorate the runway.”

Topper smiled despite himself. A small, involuntary thing.

Engines ignited. The jet vibrated under him, alive now, hungry. The smell of fuel filled the cockpit, drowning out cinnamon. He taxied toward the runway, following the painted lines like they were the only sane thing left in the world.

As he rolled into position, Kent’s jet pulled up beside him. Kent’s canopy was down, but Topper could imagine the grin inside.

Kent’s voice came through the radio. “Try to keep up, Harley.”

Topper replied evenly. “Try to keep it professional, Kent.”

Kent laughed. “Sure. Professional. Like your old man.”

The words landed like a slap. Topper’s fingers tightened on the controls. For a moment the cockpit seemed to shrink, the air thickening. He saw a flash—smoke, flame, a silhouette falling. His father’s name in someone else’s mouth.

He forced his grip to loosen. He breathed. He looked straight ahead at the runway, at the horizon beyond it.

“Tower,” he said, voice steady, “Harley ready for takeoff.”

“Harley,” the tower replied, “you are cleared. And remember: if you see anything you don’t recognize, it’s probably yours.”

Topper pushed the throttle forward.

The jet surged. The runway blurred. The world became speed and sound. The nose lifted, and the ground dropped away like an old grudge.

In the air, everything changed. The base became a toy. The hangars shrank. The people vanished. Up here, there was only sky, and the thin line between control and chaos.

They climbed in formation, four jets slicing upward. The radio filled with chatter.

“Anyone else smell cinnamon?” someone asked.

“That’s just Harley,” another voice said. “He’s spicing up the squadron.”

Topper ignored them. He focused on the exercise: simulated dogfight, evasive maneuvers, target practice on drones. Simple, in theory. The kind of thing you could do in your sleep, if you didn’t mind waking up dead.

Block’s voice came over the radio from command. “Okay, boys, remember your training. The enemy will try to confuse you. Don’t let them. If you get lost, just head toward the sun.”

A pilot replied, “Sir, what if it’s cloudy?”

Block paused. “Then head toward the clouds. That’s where the sun is hiding.”

Topper bit the inside of his cheek. He couldn’t afford to laugh too hard; laughter made your hands shake.

They engaged the first drill. Kent broke formation, diving hard, trying to get behind Topper. Topper rolled, climbed, cut left. The sky spun, blue and endless. G-forces pressed him into his seat. His vision narrowed at the edges.

Kent’s voice: “Got you, Harley.”

Topper checked his instruments. Kent was close, but not close enough. Topper pulled into a tight turn, letting the jet’s power do the talking. The horizon tilted. The world became a wheel.

Topper came out behind Kent. He locked on, the simulated tone buzzing in his headset.

“Fox two,” Topper said, calm.

A beep confirmed the hit.

Kent’s jet jerked as the simulator registered the kill. Over the radio, Kent swore. The sound was clipped, controlled, like he didn’t want to give Topper the satisfaction of hearing him truly angry.

“Lucky,” Kent muttered.

Topper didn’t reply. He felt something like relief, but it was edged with sadness. Winning a training fight didn’t erase anything. It didn’t change the story people told about his father. It didn’t stop the old fear from waiting in the shadows.

They ran another drill. Then another. The squadron moved through the sky like a choreographed argument: dive, roll, climb, break, reform. The jets screamed. The radio crackled with jokes and curses and half-breathed instructions.

At one point, a pilot named Wash—who looked like he’d been carved out of enthusiasm—yelled, “I’m hit! I’m hit!”

Topper snapped his head around. “Wash, it’s a simulation.”

Wash replied, voice panicked, “I know, but it feels real!”

Block’s voice cut in. “If you’re hit, land immediately! Preferably on the ground!”

Wash said, “Where else would I land, sir?”

Block answered, “In the ocean. Don’t do that. It’s wet.”

The absurdity of it all—men in million-dollar machines being guided by a man who seemed to think weather was optional—should have been comforting. It should have made it feel like a game. But Topper couldn’t forget that soon it wouldn’t be a game. Soon the missiles wouldn’t be simulated. Soon a mistake would be permanent.

After an hour, they headed back toward the base.

That’s when the first real problem happened.

Topper’s fuel gauge flickered.

He frowned. Gauges didn’t flicker. Gauges told the truth or they didn’t work. Flickering was what candles did, not instruments in a fighter jet.

He tapped the glass. The needle jumped, then settled lower than it should have been.

“Tower,” he said, “Harley. I’m reading low fuel.”

The tower replied, “Harley, you launched full.”

Topper checked again. “Unless my jet drinks when I’m not looking, something’s wrong.”

Kent’s voice cut in. “Maybe it’s nervous. It knows who’s flying.”

Topper ignored him. He switched to a backup gauge. Same reading.

“Harley,” Block’s voice came over the radio, “low fuel is a state of mind. Stay positive.”

Topper stared at the panel. “Sir, fuel is not a mood.”

Block replied, “Everything is a mood if you believe in yourself.”

Topper took a breath. “Request priority landing.”

“Granted,” tower said. “Bring her in.”

He turned toward the runway, descending. The base grew larger. The runway appeared like a thin strip of salvation. Topper lined up, steady, calm. He could land with low fuel. He’d landed with worse.

As he lowered the gear, he heard a sound like a cough.

The engine sputtered.

Topper’s stomach tightened. He glanced at the gauges. The needle dipped again.

“Come on,” he muttered, not into the mic. “Not now.”

The engine sputtered again, louder. The jet shuddered.

“Harley,” tower said, voice sharper now, “your airspeed is dropping.”

“I know,” Topper replied. He pushed the throttle forward. The engine responded with a wheeze, like an old man being asked to sprint.

Then, with the timing of a cruel joke, the cockpit filled with a faint cloud of brown dust.

Cinnamon.

The packet he’d shoved into the compartment had burst. The ventilation system had picked it up and decided the cockpit should smell like a bakery at 500 knots.

Topper coughed. His eyes watered. For a moment he couldn’t see clearly. The runway blurred, the world softening at the edges like a bad dream.

On the radio, someone laughed. “Harley, are you smoking in the cockpit?”

Topper wiped his eyes with the back of his glove. “No,” he rasped. “My jet is seasoning itself.”

He fought the controls, keeping the nose level. The engine sputtered again, and this time it didn’t recover. The jet began to sink.

“Eject,” tower ordered.

Topper’s hands hovered over the ejection handle. He could do it. He should do it. That was the safe choice.

But below him was the runway, and beyond it the base, and beyond that the world that would say: Harley couldn’t even bring it home.

His father’s shadow leaned close.

Topper gritted his teeth. “Negative. I’ve got it.”

He angled the jet, aiming for the runway threshold. The ground rushed up. He could feel the jet losing lift, slipping toward a stall.

Then, like a miracle delivered by incompetence, the engine caught—just a brief surge, a last gasp of power.

Topper used it. He flared, touched down hard, tires screaming. The jet bounced once, twice. He fought it, bringing it under control. The runway rushed beneath him in a gray blur.

He rolled to a stop with the last of his momentum, the engine dying with a final shudder.

Silence.

Topper sat there, breathing hard, cinnamon still floating in the cockpit like a mocking confetti. His hands shook now, the adrenaline catching up.

Ground crew vehicles raced toward him. One of them skidded, nearly tipping, then corrected at the last second. Another vehicle followed too closely and bumped it like a shopping cart.

Topper unlatched the canopy. Fresh air rushed in. It tasted like metal and relief.

He climbed down the ladder. His knees felt weak when his boots hit the ground, but he kept his posture straight. Pilots and mechanics gathered, staring at the jet as if it had performed a magic trick.

Kent walked up, helmet under his arm, grin thin.

“Nice landing,” Kent said. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

Topper met his gaze. “Neither did my fuel gauge.”

A mechanic leaned in, sniffed the cockpit, and frowned. “Why does it smell like French toast?”

Topper pointed at the compartment. “Ask morale.”

Commander Block arrived at a run, waving his arms like he was trying to shoo away invisible birds. He stopped too close to the jet, looked up at the intake, and squinted.

“Well,” Block said, “that was… textbook.”

Topper stared at him. “Sir, what textbook are you reading?”

Block smiled proudly. “My own. I’m writing it.”

He climbed onto the wing, slipped, caught himself, then stood as if that had been intentional.

“Harley,” Block said, lowering his voice, “good job keeping her together. Shows… grit. Like sandpaper.”

Topper nodded, not trusting himself to speak. His heart was still pounding. He could still feel the moment the engine had died, the sudden weight of the sky pressing down.

Block clapped him on the shoulder—too hard—and nearly knocked him off balance.

“Now,” Block continued, “we’ll get you another jet. One without… breakfast.”

Topper watched as mechanics swarmed the aircraft. Someone opened a panel and immediately recoiled.

“Uh,” the mechanic said, “sir? We might have a problem.”

Block leaned in. “What kind of problem? A small problem or a large problem?”

The mechanic hesitated. “A… confusing problem.”

Block nodded as if that was the most reasonable category. “Proceed.”

The mechanic pointed inside the panel. “There’s a hole in the fuel line. Like… it’s been punctured.”

The air around Topper seemed to still. He looked at the mechanic, then at Block, then at the jet. A punctured fuel line wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t cinnamon. It wasn’t morale.

It was sabotage.

Kent’s smile faltered for half a second, then returned, brighter than before. “Wow,” he said, voice light. “Looks like someone really doesn’t want you flying, Harley.”

Topper’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Funny.”

Block blinked. “Sabotage?” he repeated, as if tasting the word. “Well, that’s not allowed.”

A pilot behind them muttered, “Neither is cinnamon.”

Block ignored that. He puffed himself up. “We will investigate. Thoroughly. I will personally oversee a full inquiry.”

As he said this, he stepped backward, tripped over a wheel chock, and fell into a stack of tires. The tires toppled like dominoes, rolling across the tarmac in all directions. One tire bounced off a fuel truck. The fuel truck’s alarm began to wail.

Block emerged from the pile with a tire around his waist like a belt. He looked pleased.

“See?” he said, as if proving something. “I’m already on it.”

Topper watched the chaos unfold with a strange detachment. Part of him wanted to laugh. Part of him wanted to put his fist through something solid. Another part—the oldest part—wanted to run back into the woods and disappear.

Valerie appeared at the edge of the crowd, walking with purpose. She wore civilian clothes and an expression that didn’t belong on a base full of men pretending they weren’t afraid. Her eyes found Topper immediately.

She stepped closer. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Topper nodded once. “Yeah.”

Valerie looked at the jet, then at the mechanics. “What happened?”

Topper hesitated. He didn’t want to say it out loud. Saying it made it real.

“Fuel line,” he said. “Someone cut it.”

Valerie’s gaze sharpened. “Someone tried to kill you.”

Topper swallowed. “Or scare me.”

Valerie’s stomach chose that moment to speak—a low, resonant rumble that sounded like distant thunder rolling over hills.

A few pilots turned their heads, startled.

Kent raised an eyebrow. “Was that… her?”

Valerie didn’t even look at him. She kept her eyes on Topper. “Do you have enemies here?”

Topper almost laughed. “Just the usual ones. Gravity. Ego. People who think my father’s mistakes are contagious.”

Valerie’s face softened. “Topper…”

He looked away, toward the runway, toward the horizon. The sky was still blue, still innocent. It always looked innocent from the ground.

“I’m fine,” he said, but the words tasted like a lie.

Valerie stepped closer, lowering her voice. “You don’t have to carry this alone.”

Topper wanted to believe her. He wanted to let the weight shift, even a little. But the weight was familiar. It had been with him so long it felt like part of his skeleton.

“I can handle it,” he said.

Valerie studied him for a moment, then nodded slowly, as if accepting the answer while not believing it.

Behind them, Block was trying to direct the investigation by pointing at random objects.

“You,” he told a mechanic, “check that jet for fingerprints.”

The mechanic stared. “Sir, it’s a jet. It’s covered in fingerprints.”

Block nodded. “Exactly. That’s where they’ll hide.”

He turned to another crewman. “And you—question the cinnamon.”

The crewman blinked. “Sir?”

Block leaned in, conspiratorial. “Cinnamon has motives.”

Topper exhaled through his nose. The base was a circus, but the hole in the fuel line wasn’t funny. Someone had put a knife to his life and called it a prank.

Kent walked away whistling, too casual. Too clean.

Topper watched him go. The anger in his chest shifted, rearranging itself into something colder.

Valerie touched Topper’s arm lightly. “Come with me,” she said. “You need to calm down before you go back up.”

Topper looked at her hand on his sleeve, at the small point of warmth in all the noise. He nodded.

They walked away from the crowd, past the hangars, toward a quieter stretch of tarmac where the wind moved freely. The roar of engines in the distance sounded like an argument the sky was having with itself.

Valerie stopped and faced him. “Listen to me,” she said. “This isn’t just about your father. Someone is making it about your father because they know it gets under your skin.”

Topper’s jaw tightened. “They’re not wrong. It does.”

Valerie’s stomach rumbled again, shorter this time, like a punctuation mark.

Topper glanced down, surprised.

Valerie sighed. “It does that when I’m stressed. Or when I’m hungry. Or when I think someone is being an idiot.”

Topper’s mouth twitched. “So… always?”

Valerie gave him a look, and despite everything, he laughed. A brief, startled sound. It felt strange in his throat, like using a muscle he’d forgotten existed.

For a moment the base seemed less sharp. The sky seemed less heavy.

Then the memory of the engine dying returned, and the laughter faded.

Topper looked at Valerie. “If someone really wanted me dead,” he said quietly, “they could do it. They could do it easily.”

Valerie’s eyes held his. “Then don’t make it easy. Don’t fly angry. Don’t fly to prove them right.”

Topper nodded, though he wasn’t sure he could follow the advice. Flying was the only place he felt both most alive and most hunted.

A loud bang echoed from the hangar area. They turned. A tow tractor had collided with a stack of crates. Someone shouted. A seagull took off in panic.

Block’s voice carried across the tarmac: “That was part of the drill!”

Valerie looked back at Topper. “This place is insane.”

Topper said, “It’s the Air Force.”

Valerie’s stomach made a small, offended noise, as if disagreeing with the statement on principle.

Topper took a deep breath. The air smelled like fuel and sunburnt rubber. He felt the old fear, the old guilt, the old need to prove himself, all tangled together like wires behind a panel.

He also felt something else: a thin thread of determination that didn’t come from anger. It came from clarity.

Someone had tried to break him. Not just the jet—the man.

Topper looked toward the runway again, toward the line where the ground ended and the sky began.

He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.

Behind him, the base continued its frantic comedy: men running, machines beeping, Commander Block shouting orders that made sense only if you didn’t think about them.

In the middle of it all, Topper stood still for a moment, letting the noise wash over him, letting it become background.

Training day, they’d called it.

Topper realized, with a small chill, that the training wasn’t only about flying.

It was about surviving the people on the ground.

Dawn came in thin slices, like someone shaving the night down to something you could swallow without choking. The carrier deck was lit in harsh cones of light that made every man look guilty, even the ones who’d only stolen extra sugar packets. Engines coughed, then roared, then settled into that steady, hungry thunder that vibrated up through boots and bones. The sea below was black glass with wrinkles, the kind that never quite reflects your face the way you hope.

Topper Harley stood by his jet with his helmet under one arm and the other hand resting on the fuselage as if it were a horse he’d known since childhood. The plane was painted in the confident colors of a nation that believed confidence could substitute for luck. Around him, crewmen scurried with clipboards and wrenches and the frantic dignity of people who had learned to do impossible things quickly and pretend it was normal.

Someone, somewhere, was playing solemn mission music on a tinny speaker. It sounded like a hymn performed by a marching band that had lost its map. A moment later the music cut off with a squeal, replaced by a sports announcer’s voice.

“Welcome, folks, to another beautiful morning of aerial violence—”

A technician slapped the speaker and the hymn returned, wounded but alive.

Topper took a breath. The air smelled of fuel, salt, and hot metal. It smelled like every choice he’d ever regretted.

“Harley!”

He turned. Commander Block was approaching with the loose-legged swagger of a man who believed the deck would politely hold still for him. Block wore his cap at an angle that suggested he’d once seen a photograph of a commander and decided to improvise. Behind him trailed an aide carrying a stack of folders and an expression that said, *I have seen the future and it is paperwork.*

Block stopped in front of Topper and offered a salute that started crisp and ended in a sort of friendly wave, as though he’d remembered halfway through that they were acquainted socially.

“Topper,” Block said, voice warm, eyes bright with the unearned optimism of the dim. “Today’s the day. We go out there, we do our jobs, we come back heroes. Simple.”

Topper nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Block leaned closer, lowering his voice as if about to share a secret of tactical genius.

“Now, I want you to remember something important,” Block said. “If at any point you get confused… just do what I would do.”

Topper’s face did not change, but something in his soul sat down.

“Yes, sir,” he said again, because there are only so many ways to say *I am doomed* in a military setting.

Block clapped him on the shoulder with such enthusiasm that Topper rocked back a step. Block’s eyes flicked to the jet.

“Beautiful bird,” Block said. “I used to fly one of these in the war.”

Topper blinked. “Sir, these were built—”

Block waved it away. “In the war. The big one. The one with the… Germans.” He paused, searching his mind like a man rummaging through a drawer full of loose batteries. “Or was it the Canadians? Anyway. Great people. Terrible at surrendering.”

An alarm sounded. A sharp, insistent *BEEP BEEP BEEP* that made every head turn.

A crewman sprinted past, yelling, “Who left a wrench in Intake Two?”

Another crewman yelled back, “It’s not mine!”

A third yelled, with offended innocence, “I don’t even own a wrench!”

Topper watched a man reach into the intake with the delicacy of someone retrieving a ring from a garbage disposal. He pulled out a wrench the size of a small canoe. The man held it up like a trophy. The alarm stopped as abruptly as it had begun, as if embarrassed.

Block nodded sagely. “See?” he said. “That’s why we have alarms. Keeps the enemy from sneaking wrenches into our planes.”

Topper’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile. It was his face briefly considering the option of screaming.

Across the deck, the other pilots were assembling. A row of men in flight suits, helmets tucked under arms, each wearing the expression he’d practiced in the mirror: part fearless, part bored, part *I definitely have a tragic backstory but I’m not going to talk about it unless it gets me promoted.*

Among them was Kent Gregory—call sign “Buzz”—standing a little too straight, chin lifted like he’d been sculpted by a committee. He saw Topper and smiled with the polished friendliness of a man who’d sharpened his teeth.

“Harley,” Buzz called. “Try not to crash today. We’re low on spare parts.”

Topper walked toward him, slow and steady. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

Buzz’s smile widened. “Good. I’d hate for you to embarrass your father again.”

The words were thrown lightly, like a paper airplane. They landed like a brick.

For a moment the deck noise faded. The engines, the shouts, the sea—it all pulled back, giving the insult room to echo.

Topper stared at Buzz. The old anger rose in him like a tide. Not the clean anger of a righteous man, but the sour, familiar anger of someone who’d been carrying other people’s opinions for too long.

He could have hit Buzz. The thought flickered, bright and tempting. He imagined the satisfaction, the brief silence, the shock on Buzz’s perfect face. He imagined the headlines: *Pilot Punches Pilot, War Delayed.*

Instead he said, evenly, “My father died doing his job.”

Buzz shrugged. “So they say.”

Valerie’s voice cut in from behind them, calm but edged. “Gentlemen.”

They turned. Valerie Golino stood there in a white coat that looked too clean for a carrier deck, her hair pulled back, her eyes steady. She held a clipboard like a weapon. The wind tugged at her coat and made her look like someone who’d wandered onto a battlefield from a hospital and decided to stay.

Buzz’s expression softened into something he probably thought was charming. “Doc,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you out here.”

“I didn’t expect to see you anywhere,” Valerie replied. “Yet here we are.”

Buzz laughed, a little too loud. “We’re about to make history.”

Valerie glanced at Topper. Her eyes lingered for a fraction longer than professional courtesy required. “Try to come back alive,” she said.

Topper nodded. “I’ll try.”

Her stomach chose that moment to make itself known. A low, resonant sound rolled out of her midsection, deep enough that a nearby crewman flinched and looked toward the sea as if expecting a whale to breach.

Buzz blinked. “Was that—”

Valerie didn’t miss a beat. “Nerves,” she said, and walked away.

Topper watched her go, and something in his chest loosened, then tightened again. The mission was real. The war was real. And the people he cared about were standing too close to the edge of it.

The loudspeaker crackled.

“Pilots to aircraft,” a voice announced. “Pilots to aircraft. This is not a drill. Repeat: this is not a drill. If you are currently drilling, stop drilling.”

A pause.

“And if anyone sees my lucky pen, please return it to the tower.”

The pilots moved. Helmets went on. Visors dropped. Straps were tightened with the ritual seriousness of men putting on armor.

Topper climbed the ladder into his cockpit. The seat hugged him like an old enemy. He settled in, hands moving through the checklist by muscle memory. Switches. Dials. Gauges. The familiar symphony of preparation: the click of toggles, the hiss of oxygen, the distant whine of turbines spooling up.

He heard his own breathing in the helmet, loud and intimate. He heard his heart, too, though he tried to pretend he didn’t.

“Tower, this is Ramrod One,” he said into the mic. His call sign had been assigned by someone with a sense of humor and a grudge. “Systems green. Ready for launch.”

The tower replied, voice clipped. “Ramrod One, you are cleared.”

On the deck, the catapult officer—face stern, body language theatrical—pointed at Topper’s jet, then at the sky, then made a gesture that could have meant *go* or *your mother was a hamster.* The catapult hooked on with a metallic clank.

Topper’s jet trembled. The engines rose to a scream. The deck beneath him blurred.

Then the catapult fired.

Acceleration slammed him back. The world snapped into a tunnel. The carrier deck dropped away like a bad memory. The sea rushed up, then fell away as he climbed. For a brief, clean moment, there was only the sky and the machine and the cold, mathematical truth of flight.

He leveled off, joined formation. Other jets slid into place beside him, sleek and predatory. The sun was creeping up behind them, turning the horizon into a strip of molten gold. The clouds looked soft enough to sleep on, which was insulting, given how hard everything else felt.

“Ramrod flight, check in,” Topper said.

“Ramrod Two, in,” came Buzz’s voice, smooth as oil.

“Ramrod Three, in,” said another pilot, voice tight with excitement or fear.

“Ramrod Four, in,” said the last, then added, “Hey, anyone else smell bacon?”

Topper frowned. “Negative.”

A pause.

“Oh,” Ramrod Four said. “That’s me.”

Topper glanced sideways and saw a thin trail of smoke curling from Ramrod Four’s engine. The jet held formation bravely, like a dog pretending it hadn’t been hit by a car.

“Ramrod Four, you’re smoking,” Topper said.

“I know,” Ramrod Four replied. “I’m trying to quit.”

“Tower, Ramrod One,” Topper said. “We’ve got an engine issue with Four.”

The tower crackled back. “Ramrod Four, report status.”

Ramrod Four sighed theatrically. “Tower, this is Ramrod Four. My engine appears to be on fire.”

There was a pause long enough to suggest someone in the tower was consulting a manual titled *What To Do When Your Plane Is Literally On Fire.*

“Ramrod Four,” the tower finally said, “is the fire… inside or outside the aircraft?”

Topper closed his eyes for half a second. “It’s outside,” Ramrod Four said. “But it’s working its way in. Like taxes.”

“Copy,” the tower said. “Ramrod Four, you are cleared to return to base.”

Ramrod Four sounded disappointed. “Aw, come on. I just got up here.”

“Return to base,” Topper repeated, voice firm.

Ramrod Four peeled off, trailing smoke like a sad parade float.

The formation tightened. They flew on, toward enemy territory, toward the place on the map that had been circled in red like a wound.

The radio chatter filled the cockpit. Pilots making jokes. Pilots reciting coordinates. Pilots asking if anyone had seen their lucky pen.

Topper listened, half amused, half tense. Humor was a life raft. It kept men afloat in waters that would otherwise swallow them.

The first sign that the universe was not taking them seriously came in the form of a bird.

It appeared out of nowhere—a large seabird, white and arrogant, flying directly into their path as if it owned the sky. Topper swore and banked slightly. The bird did not adjust. It stared straight ahead with the calm certainty of an animal that had never read a mission briefing.

“Bird!” someone yelled over the radio.

Buzz laughed. “Relax. Birds aren’t real.”

Then the bird struck Ramrod Three’s canopy with a wet, explosive thud.

Feathers erupted, filling the air like confetti at a wedding nobody wanted. Ramrod Three’s voice came over the radio in a high, panicked squeal.

“Ahh! I’m covered in— what is that— is that *bird*?”

Topper fought the urge to laugh. “Ramrod Three, report damage.”

“I can’t see!” Ramrod Three yelled. “My windshield is— it’s like a pillow fight in here!”

Buzz’s voice cut in, amused. “Just turn on the wipers.”

Topper blinked. “Wipers?”

There was a click. A mechanical whir. And, unbelievably, a pair of windshield wipers began sweeping across Ramrod Three’s canopy, smearing feathers and gore into a neat, horrifying paste.

Ramrod Three groaned. “That’s worse! That’s so much worse!”

Topper’s laughter burst out before he could stop it, sharp and brief. It felt like coughing up a piece of fear.

“Ramrod Three, can you maintain formation?” Topper asked, trying to sound like a leader and not like a man watching a cartoon.

“I can maintain *something*,” Ramrod Three said. “I don’t know what. But I’m maintaining it.”

They pressed on.

The coastline appeared ahead, dark and jagged. The land beyond it looked wrong, like a stage set painted by someone who’d only heard rumors of geography. Mountains rose too dramatically. Forests were too conveniently placed. A river curved like it had been drawn by a bored child.

Topper’s navigation display flickered. The map shifted. For a second, the terrain below was labeled in cheerful font: *WELCOME TO ADVENTURE LAND.*

Topper tapped the display. It returned to normal. He decided not to mention it.

“Approaching target zone,” the tower said. “Maintain radio discipline.”

Buzz immediately said, “Tower, this is Ramrod Two. I’d like to report that Ramrod One is maintaining a radio *indiscipline.*”

Topper ignored him.

As they crossed into enemy airspace, the sky seemed to change texture. It wasn’t just the light. It was the feeling—the subtle tightening in the gut, the sense that invisible eyes had noticed them.

A warning tone sounded in Topper’s cockpit. A clean, cold beep that meant *someone is trying to kill you.*

“Radar lock,” Topper said. “We’ve got company.”

“Finally,” Buzz replied, almost delighted.

Missiles rose from the ground like angry punctuation. Thin white trails stabbing upward, curving toward the jets with predatory patience.

“Break!” Topper shouted.

The formation exploded into motion. Jets rolled and dove, leaving contrails like frantic signatures. Topper yanked the stick, felt the G-forces press him down, heavy and insistent. The world outside tilted. The horizon spun.

A missile streaked past his left wing, close enough that he felt the heat through the cockpit. It missed, then looped around, stubborn as a debt collector.

“Chaff, chaff!” Topper said, hitting the countermeasure switch.

A burst of metallic strips sprayed behind him, glittering in the sun like a handful of thrown coins. The missile hesitated, confused, then chose a different target—Buzz.

“Ramrod Two, missile on your six,” Topper warned.

Buzz laughed. “I know. I invited it.”

Buzz rolled, dove, then pulled up sharply, the missile following with the devotion of a lovesick idiot. At the last second Buzz hit his own countermeasures. The missile swerved, locked onto the chaff, and exploded in a bright, useless bloom.

Buzz’s voice came over the radio, smug. “See? Easy.”

Topper gritted his teeth. “Stay focused.”

They descended toward the target area: an enemy installation tucked into a valley, bristling with anti-aircraft guns. The mission was simple on paper: destroy the facility, neutralize the threat, return home. Paper, Topper thought, was famously optimistic.

Tracer fire rose to meet them, bright lines scribbling in the air. Flak bursts popped like dark flowers.

Topper lined up his approach, hands steady. He could do this. He’d trained for this. He’d been born for this, according to people who liked to romanticize trauma.

Then the radio crackled with Commander Block’s voice from the ship.

“Ramrod flight, this is—” Block paused. “This is… Boat.”

Topper frowned. “Commander Block, confirm transmission.”

“Yes, yes,” Block said. “Listen, boys, I just wanted to say… good luck. And remember: the enemy is… over there.”

Topper stared at his instruments, as if they might explain.

Block continued, “Also, I pushed a button and now the coffee machine is speaking French. If anyone knows how to fix that, please advise.”

“Commander, we are currently under fire,” Topper said.

“Oh!” Block said, surprised. “Well, don’t let that distract you.”

The transmission cut off with a squeal.

Buzz snorted. “Inspiring.”

Topper forced his attention back to the target. The valley opened up ahead. The installation was larger than expected, with multiple structures and a central tower. It looked like something designed by a villain who’d been given a generous budget and poor taste.

“Ramrod One, you’re cleared hot,” came the tower’s voice.

Topper armed his weapons. The HUD glowed with numbers and symbols. The target box settled over the central tower.

He began his dive.

The world narrowed. The flak grew thicker. His jet shook as turbulence and explosions jostled it. He held the line, fought the instinct to pull away too soon.

He heard his own breath, fast and loud. He heard, beneath it, a whisper of memory: his father’s voice, or maybe just the version of it his guilt had invented.

*Don’t flinch.*

Topper didn’t.

He released his payload.

Bombs dropped cleanly, falling away like dark thoughts. For a moment there was silence—just the rush of air, the hum of systems.

Then the bombs hit.

The explosion blossomed, bright and violent. The tower shuddered, then collapsed in on itself, a slow-motion surrender. Secondary blasts rippled outward. Fire and smoke rose in a thick column.

“Direct hit!” someone yelled over the radio.

Topper pulled up hard, climbing out of the dive. His stomach lurched as the G-forces changed. The sky opened above him, wide and indifferent.

Buzz’s voice came in, triumphant. “Nice shot, Harley. Maybe you’re not cursed after all.”

Topper didn’t reply. He was scanning for threats, for missiles, for anything that might turn success into tragedy.

That’s when the ground lit up again.

More missiles. More tracers. The enemy was not done.

“Multiple launches!” Topper shouted. “Evasive!”

They scattered. Jets darted through the air like startled fish. The radio filled with overlapping voices, swears, laughter, sudden prayers.

Ramrod Three, still half-blinded by bird paste, yelled, “I can’t tell which way is up!”

Buzz replied, “Up is the direction you’re not currently going!”

Topper caught a glimpse of something below—movement in the trees, figures running. For a heartbeat the scene shifted, absurdly, into something else: a line of solemn men on horseback cresting a ridge, silhouetted against the sunrise. The image was so perfect it felt stolen.

Topper blinked. The figures were gone. In their place: ordinary soldiers, scrambling, small and frantic.

His navigation display flickered again. This time it showed a different map entirely—one with musical notes instead of coordinates.

A piano chord crackled through the radio.

Topper froze. “What the—”

Another chord. Smooth, jazzy. Then a melody, warm and intimate, as if someone had decided the middle of a combat mission was the ideal time for a lounge performance.

“Is… is someone playing piano?” Ramrod Three asked, bewildered.

Buzz’s voice was delighted. “Oh, I love this song.”

Topper scanned his instruments. Everything read normal. The only abnormality was the fact that the war had apparently developed a soundtrack.

“Tower, Ramrod One,” Topper said. “We are receiving… music on the comms.”

The tower replied, uncertain. “Say again, Ramrod One?”

“We’re receiving piano music,” Topper repeated, as if that would make it more reasonable.

A pause. Then, faintly, Block’s voice came over the line, muffled. “I told you the coffee machine was speaking French…”

The piano music swelled, joined by a second instrument—another piano, harmonizing. The melody became lush, romantic, ridiculous.

Topper’s eyes widened as he looked down.

In a clearing near the installation—right in the middle of smoke and chaos—sat two grand pianos, glossy black, untouched by dust. Two men in white suits were playing them with serious concentration, as if the bombs were merely applause.

Topper stared. “Am I hallucinating?”

Buzz laughed. “If you are, it’s tasteful.”

The pianos continued, undisturbed. A missile launched nearby, arced upward, then seemed to hesitate, as if reluctant to interrupt the performance. It veered away at the last second, exploding harmlessly in the distance.

Topper shook his head hard. The absurdity was a pressure release, a crack in the dam of terror. He felt laughter bubble up again, wild and helpless.

Then a warning tone screamed in his cockpit. A missile lock, sharp and urgent.

Reality snapped back.

“Missile on me!” Topper shouted.

He rolled left, dove, hit countermeasures. The missile followed, stubborn. He could see it now, a white dart with a bright tail, closing fast.

Topper’s hands moved without thought. He yanked the stick, pulled into a tight turn that made his vision gray at the edges. The missile overshot, then looped back.

“Come on,” Topper muttered, teeth clenched. “Come on.”

He spotted a canyon ahead, narrow and twisting. He aimed for it, because sometimes the only way out was through something that looked like a bad idea.

He dove into the canyon.

The walls rose on either side, close enough to touch. The jet screamed through the gap, the air turbulent, the controls twitchy. The missile followed, determined.

Topper flew lower, faster, skimming the canyon floor. Rocks flashed past in a blur. He could feel the plane’s limits, the edge of what it could handle.

Behind him, the missile gained.

Topper’s mind flashed—his father’s crash, the stories, the accusations. *Harley men always push too far. Harley men always break.*

“Not today,” Topper said, and pulled up sharply at the canyon’s end.

The jet climbed, clearing the rim by feet. The missile, less agile, slammed into the canyon wall and exploded in a bright, satisfying fireball.

Topper whooped, the sound raw. For a moment he felt invincible.

Then his fuel warning light blinked.

He stared at it. “What?”

His gauge was dropping faster than it should. He’d been burning fuel hard in the evasive maneuvers. He’d been in the fight longer than planned. The mission had turned into a circus, and circuses, he remembered, were expensive.

“Ramrod One, report fuel state,” the tower called.

Topper hesitated. “Low,” he said.

Buzz chimed in immediately. “He’s low on everything. Fuel, confidence, family pride—”

“Ramrod Two,” Topper snapped, “shut up and check your own gauges.”

Buzz paused. “Oh.”

A beat.

“Uh, Ramrod One,” Buzz said, voice suddenly less smug, “I may have a slight issue.”

Topper’s stomach tightened. “What issue?”

Buzz cleared his throat. “I appear to have… deployed my refueling probe.”

Topper blinked. “You’re not refueling.”

“I know,” Buzz said. “But it’s out. And it won’t go back in.”

Topper glanced over and saw it: Buzz’s jet flying with the refueling probe extended like a ridiculous metal nose. It made his sleek fighter look like a narwhal.

Ramrod Three’s voice came over, still distressed. “Why does Buzz’s plane have a horn?”

Buzz snapped, defensive. “It’s tactical.”

Topper rubbed his forehead inside his helmet. “Buzz, retract it.”

“I’m trying,” Buzz said. “It’s stuck.”

“Stop playing with it,” Ramrod Three muttered.

Buzz ignored him. “Harley, you’ve got to help me. If I land like this, they’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

Topper stared ahead at the horizon, where their carrier waited like a small, safe lie. The mission wasn’t over until they were home. And even then, the war would still be there, waiting for another dawn.

“Fine,” Topper said. “Stay close. We’ll figure it out.”

“Copy,” Buzz said, relief creeping in. “And Harley?”

“What.”

“Thanks.”

Topper didn’t answer. Gratitude felt too heavy for the air. He focused on flying.

They regrouped, battered but intact, and turned toward home. Behind them, smoke rose from the valley. The enemy installation burned, the pianos still faintly visible through the haze, the melody fading like a joke told too far away.

On the radio, Commander Block’s voice returned, cheerful.

“Good news, boys,” Block said. “We’ve successfully destroyed the enemy’s… uh… thing.”

Topper sighed. “Yes, sir.”

“And bad news,” Block continued. “I accidentally launched the emergency slide. It’s now floating away. If anyone sees it, please pick it up.”

Buzz chuckled. Ramrod Three groaned. Topper stared at the sky, at the thin line between comedy and catastrophe.

He thought of Valerie, back on the ship, listening to their voices and pretending not to worry. He thought of his father, a ghost made of rumor and regret. He thought of the explosion, the canyon, the missile that had almost ended him.

He’d survived. He’d hit the target. He’d done his job.

And still, the war felt like a prank played by a universe with terrible timing.

As the carrier grew larger on the horizon, Topper’s fuel light blinked again, insistent.

He swallowed.

“Tower,” he said, voice steady, “Ramrod One requesting priority landing.”

The tower replied, “Copy, Ramrod One. You are cleared for approach.”

Topper glanced at Buzz’s jet, still sporting its ridiculous horn.

“Buzz,” Topper said, “when we get back, you’re buying me a drink.”

Buzz laughed. “Deal. Make it two. One for you, one for your father’s ghost.”

Topper’s jaw tightened—then, unexpectedly, he laughed. It was short, sharp, and real.

“Just land the damn plane,” he said.

They descended toward the deck, toward the thin strip of steel that would decide whether this day ended in cheers or silence. The sea waited below, patient as ever. The engines screamed. The hook dropped.

And somewhere, in the back of Topper’s mind, a quiet thought rose, strange and steady:

*Maybe the family name isn’t cleared by surviving. Maybe it’s cleared by choosing, every time, to fly anyway.*

Night comes down the way a heavy curtain falls in an old theater—fast, dusty, and without asking permission.

Topper’s jet lies on its side in a shallow bowl of sand and scrub, the nose buried like it’s ashamed of what it couldn’t do. One wing is bent up at an angle that suggests the plane is trying to wave for help. The canopy is gone. The cockpit is open to the sky, to the cold, to the thin, needling stars that look like they’ve been hammered into place with impatience.

Topper Harley hangs from his harness for a second too long, stunned by the sudden quiet. The engine has stopped screaming. The instruments have stopped their frantic blinking. The world has decided, for the moment, to let him breathe.

He fumbles for the release. His fingers are clumsy, as if they belong to a man who has never met his own hands before. When the harness finally gives, he drops onto the sand with a grunt that is half pain, half insult. The sand puffs up around him, warm and granular, smelling faintly of metal and something old.

He sits there, legs splayed, helmet still on, visor smeared. He listens.

No sirens. No triumphant music. No radio voice saying, *Good job, Topper, you redeemed the Harley name.* Only the soft tick-tick of cooling metal and, somewhere far off, the faint percussion of war continuing without him.

He reaches up and pulls the helmet off. The night air hits his sweat and turns it to a chill film. His hair springs up in a ridiculous tuft, like it’s trying to escape his skull. He laughs once—an involuntary bark—and then the laugh dies as quickly as it came.

Because he’s alive.

And he can’t decide whether that feels like mercy or an administrative error.

He crawls out of the wreckage, careful not to slice himself on the jagged edges. His shoulder complains in a sharp, bright way that suggests it will have opinions for days. He stands, sways, then steadies himself with a hand on the fuselage.

The plane’s skin is warm, as if it still remembers flight. There’s a smell of scorched wiring, hydraulic fluid, and burned paint—an acrid perfume that clings to the back of the throat. Topper inhales it anyway. It’s familiar. It’s the scent of every mistake he’s ever made at speed.

He pats his flight suit pockets automatically. Flare. Knife. A small emergency beacon the size of a bar of soap. A folded map that was printed by someone who apparently believed the world is shaped like a rectangle and labeled in a font designed to humiliate the reader.

He finds the radio. It’s cracked. He taps it. Nothing. He shakes it like a stubborn vending machine. Still nothing.

“Of course,” he mutters, and his voice sounds strange out here, too loud and too lonely.

He looks up at the sky. Somewhere beyond those stars, men are flying, shouting, firing, dying, living. Somewhere beyond those stars, Commander Block is probably pressing buttons with the confidence of a toddler piloting a blender. Somewhere beyond those stars, Valerie is listening to static and trying to pretend she isn’t afraid.

And somewhere inside Topper’s skull, his father is still dying.

That’s the thing about guilt: it doesn’t care about geography. It follows you into cockpits, into bedrooms, into silence. It follows you into the desert behind enemy lines and sits beside you like an unwanted passenger, buckled in, humming.

He starts walking away from the wreck, because staying near it feels like waiting to be found, and being found feels like an ending he hasn’t chosen. The sand shifts under his boots. His shadow moves with him, long and warped by the moonlight. The desert is not empty; it’s full of small sounds—wind worrying at dry plants, insects clicking their tiny jaws, distant artillery like thunder with a grudge.

After a few minutes he realizes he’s walking in a circle. The wreckage is still there, faintly gleaming. The desert has a sense of humor.

He stops. He closes his eyes. He tries to remember the survival training, the calm voice of the instructor saying, *Don’t panic. Make a plan. Prioritize water, shelter, signaling.*

He opens his eyes and looks around for water.

The desert offers him a rock shaped like a chicken.

He looks for shelter.

The desert offers him a bush that looks like it’s trying to apologize for being alive.

He looks for something useful.

The desert offers him a piano.

It’s black, upright, and perfectly out of place, sitting on the sand as if someone set it there and walked away, satisfied with the absurdity. The lid is closed. The keys are clean. It might as well have a sign that says *Symbolism.*

Topper stares at it for a long time, waiting for it to explain itself.

It doesn’t.

He walks up to it, touches the polished wood. It’s cool. Real. Not a mirage. He lifts the lid. The keys gleam like teeth.

He presses one. A note rings out, pure and bright, and then the sound is swallowed by the night.

Topper laughs again, softer this time. “Sure,” he says to the piano, to the war, to the universe. “Why not.”

He sits on the sand in front of it, as if he’s about to play a concert for scorpions. He doesn’t know why he sat. Maybe because sitting is better than collapsing. Maybe because the piano feels like a joke the world is telling him, and he wants to hear the punchline.

He rests his hands on the keys.

He plays two notes. They clash. He plays a third. It doesn’t help. He stops.

“I don’t even know how to do this,” he tells the piano.

The piano says nothing, but the silence feels judgmental.

He stands and walks on, leaving the piano behind like a thought he can’t afford. The moonlight paints the sand in pale stripes. His boots leave a trail that the wind immediately begins to erase, as if the desert is embarrassed by evidence.

He finds a low ridge and climbs it, hoping for a view. At the top, the land rolls out in every direction, a dark sea of dunes and scrub. Far away, a line of light flickers—maybe a road, maybe a village, maybe the edge of the world. Closer, there’s movement: a cluster of shapes, low and slow, like beetles.

He squints.

Vehicles. A patrol.

Enemy.

They’re not close enough to hear him, but close enough that if he stands here like a statue, they’ll eventually find him by accident. He drops down behind the ridge and crawls, belly scraping sand, feeling ridiculous and alive.

The patrol’s voices drift toward him, carried by the wind. He can’t make out words at first, only the cadence of argument. Then, as they come nearer, he hears enough to understand they’re fighting over directions.

One voice says something sharp. Another answers, defensive. A third voice breaks in, louder, and the whole thing dissolves into a chorus of irritated confusion.

Topper peers over the ridge.

Three soldiers stand by a jeep. One holds a map. He holds it upside down.

Another soldier points at the map with great authority, which is impressive considering the map is upside down. The third soldier gestures toward the horizon, then toward the map, then toward his own chest, as if the problem might be solved by accusing the paper of insulting him.

Topper watches, blinking.

War is full of terrifying competence, and also—apparently—this.

The soldier with the map turns it sideways. The other two lean in, solemn, like doctors studying an X-ray. They nod. They argue again. One of them takes out a compass and holds it near a metal belt buckle, then looks confused when it spins like a drunk ballerina.

Topper’s mouth twitches. He clamps it shut. He doesn’t want to laugh. Laughing feels dangerous. Laughing feels like tempting fate.

But the absurdity is so clean, so crisp, that it cuts through his fear like a blade. For a second, he’s not a fallen pilot behind enemy lines. He’s just a man watching three grown adults lose a fight with a piece of paper.

The patrol moves on, still arguing, their voices fading.

Topper stays low until he can’t hear them anymore. Then he sits back against the ridge and exhales, long and shaky. His heart is hammering like it’s trying to escape his ribs.

He checks his beacon again. It’s intact. He could turn it on, signal for rescue.

He imagines the rescue helicopter coming in, bright and loud, like a promise. He imagines being lifted out of the desert, carried back to safety, to a debriefing room, to a medal ceremony, to a headline: *Harley Survives Crash.*

And then he imagines the other headline that lives behind it: *Harley Crashes Again.*

He stares at the beacon in his hand as if it might bite him.

His father’s face rises uninvited in his mind—not a photograph, not the clean image they put on memorial walls, but a memory made of fragments: the smell of aftershave, the roughness of a flight jacket, the sound of a laugh that ended too soon.

And then the other memory—the one Topper has tried to bury under bravado and jokes and speed. The memory of the day his father died. The day the story began.

He sees it as he always sees it: smoke, a broken horizon, voices shouting, the radio crackling. He hears his father’s name spoken like a verdict.

*He panicked.*

*He froze.*

*He failed.*

Topper’s stomach tightens. He presses his palm into his eyes until he sees stars behind his eyelids.

“Stop,” he whispers.

The desert doesn’t stop. The war doesn’t stop. The memory doesn’t stop.

He stands, because standing feels like doing something. He walks, because walking feels like not giving in. The sand drags at his boots. His shoulder throbs in time with his heartbeat. He keeps moving toward the faint line of light in the distance.

After what could be an hour or ten minutes—time is slippery out here—he sees a small cluster of low buildings. Not a village, not a base, more like a forgotten outpost. A few lights glow weakly. A radio antenna rises like a skeletal finger.

He crouches behind a boulder and watches.

Two guards sit outside, bored. One is smoking. The other is eating something from a tin with the focus of a man solving a puzzle. Their rifles lean against a wall, casual.

Topper’s brain begins to work the way it works in the air: quick calculations, angles, timing. He is surprised by the calm that settles over him. Not confidence. Not bravado. Just a clear, cold focus.

He checks his knife. He checks his flare. He checks the pistol strapped to his thigh.

He breathes in. He breathes out.

He moves.

He slides along the shadows, keeping low, using the boulder, then a scrub bush, then the edge of a wall. His boots barely whisper. The guards don’t look up. The smoker flicks ash and complains about something. The eater laughs, mouth full, and shakes his head.

Topper edges closer, close enough now to smell the smoke, to hear the wet scrape of spoon against tin.

He could take them out. He could do it fast. He could do it clean.

His hand tightens on the knife.

And then—bursting through his focus like a bad commercial—his father’s voice appears in his head, not accusing, not angry, just tired.

*Don’t make it about killing, Topper. Make it about coming home.*

Topper freezes.

The voice is impossible. The voice is his own memory dressed up as guidance. But it hits him in the chest anyway.

He lowers the knife.

He waits.

A third soldier emerges from inside the building, carrying a stack of papers. He barks something at the guards. They stand, annoyed, and follow him inside, leaving their rifles leaning against the wall like abandoned umbrellas.

Topper watches the doorway swallow them.

Then he moves again, faster now. He grabs one rifle, then the other, slings them awkwardly. He darts to the doorway and presses himself against the wall, listening.

Inside, voices. A radio crackling. A generator humming. The smell of stale coffee and sweat.

He slips in.

The room is dim, lit by a single hanging bulb. A table with maps. A radio set with dials and wires. A chalkboard with scribbles. A poster on the wall of a smiling leader pointing toward a bright future that looks suspiciously like a parking lot.

The soldiers are in the back room, arguing again—about the papers, about the map, about whose turn it is to clean something.

Topper crosses to the radio. His hands move without thinking. He turns dials, listens for a frequency. Static. More static. Then—faint, distant—English voices, clipped and urgent.

He leans in.

“—repeat, we lost contact with—”

Topper grabs the microphone. His mouth goes dry. He imagines speaking and having his voice come out wrong, weak, childish.

He presses the button. “This is Topper Harley,” he says, and the name lands in the room like a thrown stone. “I’m down. I’m—” He swallows. “I’m alive.”

The radio hisses. Then a voice: “Harley? Confirm position.”

Topper looks at the map on the table. It’s marked in a language he doesn’t read. He sees a symbol that might be this outpost, a dot by a line. He tries to translate distance and direction into words.

“I’m near a—” He looks around. “—a building. With a light. And a poster. It’s very—” He stops, realizing how stupid he sounds. “Stand by. I’ll get coordinates.”

He fumbles with the map, trying to find numbers, anything recognizable. His finger lands on a grid. He reads it off, hoping it means something.

The voice returns, sharper now. “We have you. Rescue is not immediate. Enemy activity—”

A noise behind him.

Topper turns.

One of the soldiers stands in the doorway to the back room, staring at him with the slow surprise of a man who has walked into his own kitchen and found a stranger making a sandwich.

For a second, nobody moves. The soldier’s mouth opens. Topper’s hand goes to his pistol.

The soldier shouts.

Everything explodes into motion. Topper fires once—into the ceiling, not the man. The bulb shatters. Darkness drops like a hammer. The room fills with yells and scrambling feet. Someone fires blindly. Bullets chew the table. Wood splinters. The radio crackles with frantic questions.

Topper dives behind the table, heart pounding, and crawls toward the door. He can’t see much, only shapes and flashes. He hears a soldier trip over a chair and curse loudly, which would be funny if it weren’t trying to kill him.

Topper rolls out the doorway into the night, sand biting his palms. He runs.

Behind him, the outpost erupts with shouting. A light clicks on. A spotlight sweeps the desert, slow and searching.

Topper drops flat, presses his face into the sand, and lies still as the beam passes over him, missing him by a few feet. He holds his breath until his lungs burn.

When the light moves on, he crawls away, then rises and runs again, hunched low. His shoulder screams. His legs feel like they’re filled with wet cement. He keeps going anyway.

He doesn’t stop until he reaches a shallow ravine, a cut in the earth that offers darkness like shelter. He drops into it and lies on his back, staring up at the strip of sky.

His chest heaves. His throat tastes like copper. He laughs once, breathless and bitter.

“Well,” he whispers to nobody, “that went great.”

He reaches for the beacon again.

His thumb hovers over the switch.

He thinks of Valerie. He thinks of her steady eyes, the way she listened to him as if his pain was a thing that could be handled, not a thing that had to be hidden. He thinks of her stomach, absurd and talented, making whale songs in the middle of a tense briefing, and how the sound had broken the room’s cruelty for a moment.

He thinks of Commander Block, his bumbling, well-meaning disaster of a commander, who would probably try to rescue him personally and end up accidentally rescuing an enemy goat.

He thinks of the squadron. Of the rival who wanted him to fail. Of the men who wanted him to succeed for reasons they couldn’t articulate.

And then he thinks of his father again.

Not the myth. Not the headline. Not the cautionary tale.

A man in a flight suit, tired around the eyes, smiling anyway. A man who, like Topper, had probably been scared and stubborn and proud. A man who had made a choice in a moment that nobody else could fully understand.

Topper closes his eyes, and the desert noise recedes. The wind becomes a low whisper. The distant artillery becomes a heartbeat.

And in that thin space between exhaustion and dream, he sees his father standing at the edge of the ravine.

It’s not a ghost in the dramatic sense. There are no glowing edges, no ethereal music. His father looks annoyingly normal—hands in pockets, hair slightly messed, expression somewhere between amused and concerned.

Topper’s throat tightens. “Dad?”

His father shrugs, as if being dead is an inconvenience but not a tragedy. “You look like hell.”

Topper laughs, and the laugh comes out wet. “I crashed.”

“I noticed,” his father says, nodding toward the distant wreck that can’t be seen from here. “You always did make an entrance.”

Topper tries to sit up, but his body feels heavy, pinned by fatigue. “They said you—” He swallows. “They said you panicked. That you froze. That you—”

His father holds up a hand. “They say a lot of things. People love a story they can repeat. Makes them feel like they understand what happened.”

Topper’s eyes burn. “Did you?”

His father’s face shifts, the humor draining out. “I was scared,” he says simply. “I was human. I made a call. It was the best one I could make with what I knew. And then it was too late.”

Topper’s chest aches, a deep, dull pain that feels older than his bones. “So I’m just… destined to do the same thing?”

His father snorts. “Destined? What is this, a fortune cookie?” He leans forward. “You’re not a headline, Topper. You’re not my shadow. You’re not their opinion. You’re a pilot. And a man. And you get to decide what you do next.”

Topper stares at him. “I’m tired.”

“I know,” his father says, softer. “You’ve been tired for a long time.”

Topper’s jaw trembles. “I wanted to clear your name.”

His father’s eyes narrow, not angry, just focused. “Clear it for who?”

Topper doesn’t answer.

His father gestures broadly, encompassing the desert, the war, the distant lights. “These people? This machine? They’ll chew you up and spit you out and then argue about whether you tasted heroic. You can’t fly for their approval. You’ll crash every time.”

Topper’s eyes fill. He wipes at them with the heel of his hand, furious at himself. “Then what do I do?”

His father’s voice is quiet, but it lands hard. “You fly because it’s what you can do. You fly because someone else needs you. You fly because you choose to come back. Not because you’re trying to pay a debt that doesn’t exist.”

Topper’s breath shudders. He feels something inside him—something knotted and tight—begin to loosen, not all at once, not neatly, but enough to let air in.

He blinks, and his father is still there.

Then, absurdly, a coyote trots along the edge of the ravine behind his father, pauses, and looks down at Topper with the bored expression of a critic. It yawns. It walks on.

Topper lets out a laugh that is half sob. “Even the wildlife is judging me.”

His father smiles again, faintly. “Get used to it.”

Topper reaches out, as if he can touch him, but his hand closes on empty air. The image wavers, like heat above asphalt.

“Wait,” Topper says, panic rising. “Don’t—”

His father’s voice comes from everywhere now, from the wind, from the sand, from inside Topper’s own chest. “Stop trying to earn your right to live,” it says. “You already have it.”

The ravine darkens. The strip of sky above seems to tilt. Topper’s eyelids grow heavy.

He jerks awake with a start.

He’s alone. The sky is the same. The wind is the same. The war is still out there, grinding on. His father is gone, because his father has been gone, because that’s how time works, no matter how much you bargain with it.

Topper sits up slowly, wincing. His body feels like it’s been beaten with a sack of hammers. But his mind is clearer, as if someone wiped a foggy window.

He looks at the beacon again.

This time, he doesn’t hesitate.

He flips the switch.

A small light blinks, steady and stubborn, like a heartbeat that refuses to quit.

He tucks it into a pocket where it can broadcast without being seen too easily. Then he checks his surroundings, listens. The outpost is still noisy in the distance, but the spotlight has stopped sweeping. Maybe they gave up. Maybe they’re reorganizing. Maybe they’re arguing about the map again.

Topper smiles grimly.

He begins moving along the ravine, using it as cover, heading toward higher ground where a rescue might spot him. He keeps his steps measured. He keeps his breathing controlled. He is no longer a man wandering in circles with a piano in the desert. He is a pilot with a plan.

The plan is simple: survive long enough to choose what happens next.

As he walks, he thinks of Valerie again. He imagines her hearing his voice on the radio, the way her face might soften for a second before she forces it back into professional calm. He imagines her saying his name like it matters. He imagines, absurdly, her stomach making a triumphant noise at the exact moment he steps onto the helicopter.

He thinks of the squadron. He thinks of the rival he saved by not killing the guards when he had the chance—because the point isn’t to be the deadliest man in the desert. The point is to come home with your humanity intact, if you can.

He thinks of his father’s last line—*You already have it*—and feels it settle into him like ballast, like something that makes him steadier in the air.

The night deepens. The stars sharpen. The desert stretches.

And Topper Harley keeps moving, not because he’s fearless, but because he’s finally stopped asking fear for permission.

Behind him, the war continues its noisy, ridiculous, lethal argument with itself.

Ahead of him, somewhere beyond the dunes, a rotor will eventually thump the air. A voice will crackle over a radio. A hand will reach down.

Topper doesn’t know exactly how it will happen, only that it must.

He walks toward that future with a limp and a stubborn set to his jaw, carrying his name not like a burden, but like a thing he can finally hold without flinching.

### Chapter 7 — The Final Strike and the Most Ridiculous Heroism

The sky that morning looked scrubbed raw, a pale blue sheet pulled tight over the world. It should have felt clean. It didn’t. It felt like the kind of quiet you hear right before a plate shatters.

On the carrier, the deck crews moved with the practiced hurry of people who had learned to run without looking like they were running. Men pointed, nodded, waved their arms in semaphore, and occasionally waved at no one in particular, as if greeting a ghost. A jet coughed, another whined, a third made a sound like a lion clearing its throat.

In the cramped command room below, Commander Block stood over a console with a confidence that could have powered a small city. His chest was full of medals and his head was full of weather.

“Gentlemen,” he announced, “this is it. Today we do what we were trained to do. We go out there and we… we do it.”

A young lieutenant leaned in. “Sir, which button arms the missiles?”

Block stared at the panel as if it had personally insulted him. Every button was labeled with a word that meant something to someone. ARM. SAFE. TEST. DO NOT PRESS. PRESS ONLY IN EMERGENCY. COFFEE.

Block pressed COFFEE.

Somewhere, a coffee maker began to scream.

“Excellent,” Block said. “Now we’re thinking.”

The lieutenant tried again, pointing. “Sir—ARM?”

Block followed the finger, nodded gravely, and pressed DO NOT PRESS.

A red light blinked. An alarm began, not a heroic alarm but the kind you hear in a supermarket when the freezer door has been left open.

“Ah,” Block said, pleased. “That means it’s working.”

Above them, in the air, the world had already started coming apart.

Topper Harley was not supposed to be there.

He was supposed to be down in the desert, bruised and dusty, telling himself stories about redemption while eating something he had stolen out of an enemy ration pack that tasted like regret. He was supposed to be stranded, a footnote, a cautionary tale, a man who had tried to outfly his past and finally hit it head-on.

Instead he was in a cockpit again, because fate had a sense of humor and so did gravity.

His jet—if you could still call it that—had been patched with whatever he could find. A panel on the right side had been replaced with what looked suspiciously like a piece of corrugated roofing. The HUD flickered between altitude, speed, and a blinking message that read: HAVE A NICE DAY. The left aileron made a noise like a door complaining.

When he keyed the radio, it crackled with voices and panic and static, like a room full of people trying to talk through a waterfall.

“—Mayday, Mayday, I’m taking fire—”

“—Who’s on my wing? Who’s on my—”

“—I can’t see anything, my canopy’s fogging up, it’s like I’m inside a sauna—”

“—This is not a sauna, this is combat—”

Topper listened, jaw tight, hands steady in a way that surprised him. The fear was there, sure. It always was. But it had changed shape. It wasn’t a monster anymore; it was a tool. A sharp thing you could hold without cutting yourself if you were careful.

He found the formation—or what was left of it—by following the smoke.

Two jets were spiraling away, one trailing flame like a comet, the other trailing what might have been a long streamer of toilet paper. A third was flying upside down, though the pilot sounded convinced he was right-side up.

Topper clicked in. “This is Harley.”

A beat of silence, as if the radio itself had to process that sentence.

Then a voice, incredulous. “Harley? You’re… you’re alive?”

Topper stared at the horizon, at the thin line where sky met sand. “Last I checked.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

Topper considered saying: arguing with my childhood. Wrestling with my father’s ghost. Learning that shame is just pride with bad posture. Instead he said, “Traffic.”

The voice on the other end sputtered, then laughed—one sharp bark that sounded like relief trying to disguise itself as contempt.

“Harley, get out of here,” the voice snapped. It was the smug ace—Kent Gregory, teeth bright, ego brighter. “You’re not in this mission.”

Topper watched Gregory’s jet wobble as a missile passed close enough to rattle his soul. “Looks like I am.”

“Command didn’t authorize—”

“Command,” Topper said, and thought of Block pressing COFFEE, “is busy.”

He slid his battered jet into position behind Gregory. The enemy base was ahead, a dark smudge on the earth, bristling with anti-aircraft guns that flashed like angry cameras. The plan had been simple on paper: approach low, strike fast, get out. The plan in the air had become something else: survive, improvise, don’t die.

Topper’s cockpit smelled like sweat and burnt wiring. He could hear his own breathing, too loud. He could also hear, somewhere behind that, the old voice: You don’t belong here. You’re going to fail. You always fail.

He let it talk. He didn’t answer.

“Harley,” Gregory said, voice suddenly strained, “I’ve got a lock warning. I’m—”

Gregory’s sentence cut off in a burst of static. His jet lurched. Topper saw the flare of a missile leaving an enemy launcher, saw it arc upward with a terrible grace.

Time did that thing it does in war: it stretched, it slowed, it made room for thought.

Topper could have watched. He could have let the ace fall, let fate settle an old score. He could have told himself it was not his job, not his problem, not his redemption.

Instead his hands moved.

He punched his throttle, shoved his stick, and threw his jet between Gregory and the incoming missile.

“Harley, what are you—”

Topper didn’t answer. He hit the countermeasure switch.

Nothing happened.

Of course.

The switch was probably connected to the HAVE A NICE DAY sign.

Topper swore, reached down, and yanked a lever that wasn’t labeled. A hatch popped open somewhere, and a cluster of something—flares, chaff, possibly snack wrappers—burst out behind him in a glittering cloud.

The missile hesitated, confused by the sudden party. It veered, chasing the brightest thing, and exploded in a bloom of orange that shook both jets like angry hands.

Gregory’s voice came back, thin. “You… you idiot.”

Topper’s heart hammered. “You’re welcome.”

“Why did you do that?”

Topper watched the fireball fade into smoke. “I’m trying a new hobby. Being decent.”

Gregory didn’t respond. He didn’t have time. Another warning tone screamed in his cockpit, and he swore, sharp and ugly.

The squadron was breaking apart. The target was still ahead. The enemy guns were still chewing the air. The radio was a mess of half-sentences and shouted coordinates.

Topper took a breath and did something he had never done before: he stopped waiting for someone else to tell him who he was.

“All aircraft,” he said, keying the mic. His voice came out steadier than he felt. “This is Harley. Listen up.”

There was a pause, a brief lull, as if everyone had leaned closer to their radios.

Topper continued. “We’re scattered. We’re taking heavy fire. We’re still going in.”

A voice cut in. “Who put Harley in charge?”

Topper didn’t recognize it. It didn’t matter. “I did.”

Another voice, anxious. “Our lead’s down. We don’t have—”

“You have me,” Topper said. “And you have engines. Stay low. Follow my smoke.”

“Your smoke?” someone asked.

Topper glanced at the panel. A warning light blinked: ENGINE FIRE.

“Never mind,” he said. “Follow my confidence.”

He dipped his nose, dropping altitude until the ground rose up to meet him, the desert rushing beneath like a film reel. The enemy base grew larger, details sharpening: hangars, radar domes, gun emplacements. It looked less like an abstract target now and more like a place where people were standing, loading weapons, making choices.

He thought, absurdly, of Valerie.

He had left her with a promise that sounded brave at the time and now felt like a note written on a napkin. He could picture her in the operations room, headset on, eyes narrowed, listening for his voice.

As if summoned, the radio crackled and her voice slid through, warm and steady.

“Topper?”

His chest tightened. “Valerie.”

There was a beat. In that beat he heard her stomach, faintly, a low rumble like distant thunder. Even through the radio, it sounded like a reminder that bodies are ridiculous and alive.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Long story,” Topper said. “Short version: I’m back.”

A sigh, half relief, half exasperation. “Of course you are.”

“I’m going in.”

“I know.”

“Valerie—”

“Topper,” she cut in, and her voice softened. “Don’t do this to punish yourself. Do it because you want to come back.”

He swallowed. The old him would have made a joke. The old him would have deflected. The new him just said, “Okay.”

A gun emplacement opened up ahead, tracers stitching the air. Topper rolled, the rounds passing close enough to make him flinch. He felt the jet shudder, heard a metallic clang.

“Harley!” Gregory shouted. “You’re hit!”

Topper glanced at the wing. A chunk was missing, as if someone had taken a bite. “It’s fine.”

“That’s not fine!”

“It’s aerodynamic now,” Topper said. “Less drag.”

He lined up on the first target—a radar dome—and thumbed the weapons switch.

The panel flickered.

The weapons system, perhaps offended by his optimism, decided to reset itself. The screen went black, then displayed a message: WELCOME TO FLIGHT TRAINING. PLEASE SELECT DIFFICULTY.

Topper stared. “You have got to be kidding.”

He slapped the panel. The message changed: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO QUIT?

“No,” he growled, and slapped again.

The message vanished. The weapons reticle returned. Sometimes violence worked on machines too.

He squeezed the trigger.

His guns fired, the recoil vibrating up through the stick. The radar dome erupted in sparks and smoke. It collapsed like a cheap prop.

“Nice shot,” someone said over the radio, surprised.

Topper didn’t answer. He was already lining up on the next target.

Behind him, Gregory and the others followed, dropping low, streaking in like angry arrows. Bombs fell. Explosions blossomed. The enemy guns kept firing, but their aim faltered as their systems died one by one.

On the carrier, Commander Block watched the blips on the radar screen with a look of profound concentration, as if he were trying to remember how to read.

“Sir,” the lieutenant said, “Harley’s leading the strike.”

Block frowned. “Harley? I thought he was—”

“Down,” the lieutenant supplied.

Block nodded, as if this made perfect sense. “Well, then he’s up now.”

The lieutenant hesitated. “Sir, should we—should we tell him to pull out?”

Block stared at the radar. “Tell him… tell him to be careful.”

The lieutenant leaned toward the microphone. “Harley, this is command. Be careful.”

Block added, loudly, to no one in particular, “And don’t forget to write!”

The lieutenant blinked. “Write, sir?”

Block nodded. “A thank-you note. To the enemy. For hosting.”

In the air, Topper heard only the first part.

“Be careful,” he repeated, deadpan. “Copy that.”

He banked hard, dodging a missile that rose up from the base like a furious finger. It chased him, relentless, intelligent in the way only dumb things can be when they’re built for one purpose.

Topper hit his countermeasures again. This time, instead of flares, a small parachute popped out of the back of his jet, dragging a bright banner that unfurled in the slipstream.

It read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

Topper stared. “What—”

The missile, apparently touched by the sentiment, veered toward the banner and exploded. The shockwave snapped the parachute line and the banner fluttered away, burning.

Topper laughed once, sharp. “Works.”

Gregory’s voice came in, strained but alive. “Harley, the primary target’s still intact.”

Topper looked ahead. The primary target—a heavily fortified bunker—sat at the center of the base like a clenched fist. That was the heart. That was what they had come to break.

The approach to it was a corridor of fire.

The other pilots hesitated. Topper could hear it in their breathing, in the slight delay before their responses, in the way their voices rose.

“Too hot,” someone said.

“We’ll get shredded,” another muttered.

Topper understood. He could feel the heat too, not just from the explosions but from the sheer attention of all those guns turning toward him.

He thought again of his father, not as a legend or a shame, but as a man in a cockpit, making a choice. He thought of the way stories get twisted until they become weapons. He thought of how long he had lived under a sentence he had never actually read.

He keyed his mic. “I’m going in.”

“Harley, don’t,” Gregory snapped.

Topper smiled, though no one could see it. “Try to keep up.”

He dropped lower, skimming the ground so close he could see rocks and scrub whip by. The bunker grew in his windshield, huge and ugly. The anti-aircraft guns opened up, tracers converging like a net.

Topper flew into it.

The jet shook violently. Warning lights bloomed across his panel like a Christmas tree designed by a sadist. The engine whined, then coughed. The HAVE A NICE DAY sign blinked, then went dark.

A round hit his canopy. A crack spidered across the glass, right in his line of sight, turning the world into fractured pieces.

Topper’s hands tightened. He felt strangely calm, like he had finally stepped into the center of the storm.

“Valerie,” he said, without thinking, keying the radio.

“I’m here,” she answered instantly.

“I might not—”

“Don’t,” she said, fierce. “Don’t you dare narrate your own tragedy to me.”

Topper swallowed, blinked hard. “Okay.”

He armed his last bomb. The switch felt loose, as if it might fall off. He lined up, nose down, the bunker filling his vision.

Then the engine sputtered.

The jet began to lose thrust.

Topper’s stomach dropped. He was too low, too close, too committed. He could eject, sure, but the enemy guns would chew him up before his chute fully opened. He could pull up, abort, live—but the mission would fail, and the squadron would keep bleeding.

He made a decision so quickly it didn’t feel like a decision at all.

He pushed the stick forward, diving, trading the last of his altitude for speed. The jet screamed. The bunker rushed up.

At the last possible second, he released the bomb.

It fell, slow and heavy, tumbling end over end like a thought you can’t take back.

Topper yanked the stick back, pulling up with everything the jet had left.

For a breath, the world hung.

Then the bomb hit.

The bunker erupted.

The explosion was not a neat Hollywood fireball; it was a violent bloom that shoved the air outward, that punched the ground, that turned concrete into dust. The shockwave slapped Topper’s jet, flipping it sideways.

He fought the controls. The jet rolled, nose dropping. The cracked canopy vibrated, threatening to shatter.

“Harley!” Gregory shouted. “Pull up!”

Topper grunted, hauling back. The jet responded sluggishly, like a tired animal. The ground spun beneath him.

For a moment, it looked like he was going to die in the most inconvenient way possible: not in a blaze of glory, but in a dumb, unplanned smear.

Then Gregory’s jet appeared beside him, close enough that Topper could see the pilot’s helmet turn.

Gregory matched his speed, slid in, and—impossibly—nudged Topper’s wing with his own, steadying him.

“What are you doing?” Topper gasped.

“Returning the favor,” Gregory snapped. “Try not to enjoy it.”

Topper’s jet stabilized, just enough. He found a sliver of control, coaxed the nose up, climbed.

The enemy base below was burning. Secondary explosions rippled outward as fuel dumps ignited, as ammunition cooked off. The anti-aircraft fire dwindled, then stopped.

Over the radio, voices rose—cheers, laughter, disbelief.

“We did it!”

“Target destroyed!”

“I can’t believe we’re alive!”

Topper exhaled, long and shaking. His hands trembled now that the moment had passed, like his body was finally cashing the check his mind had written.

Gregory’s voice came in, quieter. “Harley.”

“Yeah?”

A pause. “You’re not your father.”

Topper stared ahead, at the open sky. “I know.”

Gregory cleared his throat, as if the words hurt. “Good.”

They turned back toward the carrier, the flight home strangely peaceful, like the world had briefly forgotten how to be loud. The sun climbed higher, warming the cockpit, making the cracked canopy glitter.

On the carrier, the deck crews spotted the returning jets and began to wave, their arms slicing the air in triumphant gestures. Someone rolled out a banner that read: WELCOME HOME HEROES. It was upside down, but the intent was there.

Commander Block emerged onto the deck, squinting up at the sky. He raised binoculars, held them backward, frowned, then shrugged.

“They’re tiny,” he said. “Must be far away.”

The lieutenant beside him smiled despite himself. “They’re coming in, sir.”

Block nodded solemnly. “Tell them to land on the runway.”

“Sir,” the lieutenant said gently, “this is a carrier.”

Block blinked, as if learning this for the first time. “Right. Then tell them to land on the… water runway.”

The lieutenant opened his mouth, closed it, and chose silence.

Topper’s landing was not graceful. His jet, held together by hope and questionable materials, hit the deck hard, bounced once, then slammed down with a screech that set teeth on edge. The arresting cable caught, jerking him forward so violently he bit his tongue.

The jet rolled to a stop.

For a moment, Topper just sat there, hands still on the controls, breathing.

Then he popped the canopy. The air rushed in, salty and sharp. The noise of the deck hit him: shouts, applause, the whine of engines, the slap of boots.

He climbed out on shaky legs.

The crew swarmed him, slapping his back, shouting his name. Someone tried to lift him onto their shoulders and nearly dropped him. Someone else handed him a bouquet of flowers that looked like it had been stolen from a funeral.

Commander Block approached, beaming. He reached out to shake Topper’s hand, missed, and grabbed Topper’s sleeve instead, shaking that vigorously.

“Harley!” Block boomed. “You did it! You destroyed the thing!”

Topper blinked. “Yes, sir.”

Block leaned in, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I always knew you had it in you. Ever since I first met you five minutes ago.”

Topper nodded, unsure how to respond.

Block straightened, then immediately stepped backward into a puddle of jet fuel, slipped, windmilled his arms, and fell into a stack of life preservers. They toppled like dominoes, burying him.

From under the pile, Block’s voice emerged, muffled but cheerful. “I meant to do that!”

The crew laughed, relieved laughter, the kind that shakes loose all the terror you’ve been holding. Topper laughed too, because it was either that or cry, and he was not ready to cry in front of men who would turn it into a drinking story.

Valerie appeared at the edge of the crowd.

She didn’t run. She walked, steady, eyes fixed on him. Her hair was wind-tossed, her expression unreadable until she got close enough that Topper could see the shine in her eyes.

The crowd, sensing something real, parted like water.

Topper’s throat tightened. He stepped toward her.

Valerie stopped in front of him, looked him up and down as if checking for missing parts. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

Topper touched his lip, found blood. “It’s nothing.”

Valerie’s stomach growled loudly, a deep, dramatic sound that made a nearby sailor jump.

Topper glanced down, then back up. “Your stomach says otherwise.”

Valerie huffed a laugh, then her face sobered. “Don’t do that again.”

Topper nodded. “Okay.”

She studied him, suspicious. “That was too easy.”

Topper swallowed. “I mean it. I’m tired of proving things to people who don’t matter. I’m tired of fighting ghosts.”

Valerie’s eyes softened. “What about your father?”

Topper looked past her, out at the sea. The horizon was a clean line, a promise and a threat.

“He was a man,” Topper said quietly. “Not a curse. Not a legend. Just… a man. And I’m not here to finish his story. I’m here to live mine.”

Valerie’s stomach made a small, satisfied purr, like an animal settling down.

Valerie stepped closer. She reached up, touched his cheek with her fingertips, gentle. “Good,” she whispered.

Topper leaned in, and they kissed.

It should have been cinematic. It should have been perfect.

Instead, behind them, Commander Block finally wriggled free of the life preservers, staggered to his feet, and shouted, “Attention! I have an announcement!”

The kiss broke. Topper and Valerie turned.

Block stood tall, chest out, face smeared with something that might have been grease or dignity. He held a megaphone upside down.

“We have won the war!” he declared.

A beat of stunned silence.

Someone coughed. Another sailor whispered, “Which war?”

Block continued, undeterred. “And as your commander, I would like to thank each and every one of you for your bravery, your courage, and your ability to follow instructions that I have not yet given.”

The crowd shifted, unsure whether to applaud.

Block raised a hand. “Also, there will be cake.”

The crowd erupted in cheers. War, apparently, was negotiable. Cake was not.

Topper looked at Valerie, amused. “We’re saved by dessert.”

Valerie smiled. “It’s the oldest strategy.”

They walked together toward the edge of the deck, away from the noise. The wind tugged at their clothes, tried to pull them back into the chaos. Topper let it. He didn’t fight the wind anymore. He just stood in it.

Below, the sea rolled on, indifferent and endless.

Above, the sky opened wide.

Topper thought of the mission, of the bunker exploding, of Gregory’s wing nudging his. He thought of the way the squadron had followed him, not because he was flawless, but because he had spoken with certainty when everyone else was drowning in doubt.

He thought of the family name he had been trying to scrub clean like a stain.

It wasn’t clean now. It was just… his. A name, not a verdict.

Valerie slipped her hand into his. Her fingers were warm.

“You did good,” she said.

Topper shook his head. “I did something.”

“That’s good enough,” Valerie replied.

Behind them, Commander Block’s voice boomed again through the megaphone, now right-side up. “And remember! If anyone asks, this was all part of the plan!”

Topper laughed, leaning into Valerie. “Sure it was.”

Valerie’s stomach rumbled, low and content, like distant applause.

The carrier cut through the water, leaving a foamy wake that looked, for a moment, like a signature.

Topper watched it fade.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, he wasn’t chasing anything. Not approval. Not revenge. Not a ghost.

Just the next day. Just the open sky. Just the ridiculous, fragile fact of being alive.

---

Some scenes from the movie Hot Shots! written by A.I.

Scene 1

## HOT SHOTS! (Spoof War/Action Comedy) — Screenplay

### Scene(s) Based on Chapter 1: “The Return of Topper Harley”

—

### MAIN CHARACTERS INTRODUCED (for this section)

– **TOPPER HARLEY (30s)** — gifted fighter pilot in exile, carrying grief like a backpack full of bricks.

– **LT. KENT GREGORY (40s)** — Air Force recruiter; a man with a clipboard, too much optimism, and not enough coordination.

– **SERGEANT “DEADPAN” RIVERA (30s)** — Gregory’s driver; says little, sees everything, judges silently.

—

## FADE IN:

### EXT. MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS — DAY

A wide, peaceful shot: snow-dusted pines, a clean sky, a cabin tucked into the quiet.

Then—

**WHACK.**

A log splits in half.

### EXT. CABIN — CONTINUOUS

**TOPPER HARLEY** chops wood with the intensity of a man trying to split his past. He’s rugged, unshaven, and focused.

A hawk cries overhead.

Topper pauses, listens like the sound might be an accusation.

He goes back to chopping.

**WHACK. WHACK. WHACK.**

A beat.

A distant RUMBLE. Growing.

Topper stops. Eyes narrow.

The rumble becomes an approaching MILITARY JEEP, bouncing up the dirt path like it hates suspension.

Topper doesn’t move. Just watches.

The jeep skids to a stop. A cloud of dust rolls over the cabin like a dramatic entrance that didn’t rehearse.

The driver, **SERGEANT RIVERA**, stays behind the wheel, expression neutral.

**LT. KENT GREGORY** climbs out, crisp uniform, clipboard, big smile. He steps forward—

—and immediately steps into a hole.

He disappears from view with a yelp.

Topper blinks once. Patient.

Gregory climbs out, covered in pine needles, trying to keep dignity on a leash.

**GREGORY**

Topper Harley?

**TOPPER**

(quiet)

Depends who’s asking.

Gregory straightens, salutes—his elbow catches a low branch and knocks his cap off.

Rivera doesn’t react. Not even a blink.

Gregory retrieves his cap, puts it on backwards, doesn’t notice.

**GREGORY**

Lieutenant Kent Gregory, United States Air Force. I’m here on official business.

Topper looks at the clipboard.

**TOPPER**

That’s a lot of paper for a short walk.

**GREGORY**

This is a very delicate matter of national security.

Gregory gestures grandly toward the jeep, accidentally flinging his pen into the woods.

He stares at his empty hand like it betrayed him.

**GREGORY (CONT’D)**

We… have a situation.

Topper returns to his log.

**TOPPER**

Everybody has a situation.

**GREGORY**

Ours has jets.

Topper’s axe stops mid-air.

A beat. He sets it down carefully, like it might explode.

**TOPPER**

I don’t fly anymore.

**GREGORY**

That’s why you’re perfect.

Topper stares at him.

**TOPPER**

That doesn’t make any sense.

**GREGORY**

It doesn’t have to. It’s the Air Force.

Rivera finally speaks, dry as dust.

**RIVERA**

Sir, your cap.

Gregory touches his head, realizes it’s backward, fixes it too aggressively. It drops over his eyes.

He lifts it again, embarrassed.

**GREGORY**

Look, Harley. The country needs you. Your skills. Your instincts.

Topper’s eyes drift to the horizon. The wind picks up.

**TOPPER**

My instincts got my father killed.

Gregory softens. Tries to.

**GREGORY**

Your father was a hero.

Topper’s jaw tightens.

**TOPPER**

That’s not what they say.

Gregory flips through his clipboard, searching for the right line, the right tone.

He finds a highlighted sentence and reads it like a man reading his own fortune.

**GREGORY**

“Public perception is… complicated.”

Topper laughs once—short, humorless.

**TOPPER**

So you came all this way to tell me people still hate my name?

**GREGORY**

No.

(beat)

I came all this way to tell you they’re about to hate it *again*… unless you come back and fix it.

Rivera watches Topper, assessing.

Topper turns away, walks toward the cabin.

Gregory follows a step, eager.

**GREGORY (CONT’D)**

We have a new operation. Top-tier. Dangerous. High-profile. The kind of mission that makes heroes.

Topper stops at the cabin door.

**TOPPER**

Or makes widows.

Gregory tries to pivot—literally pivots—slips on a patch of ice, windmills his arms.

Rivera leans out the window.

**RIVERA**

Sir—

Gregory grabs the nearest thing for balance: a hanging BIRD FEEDER.

It swings. He swings with it. The feeder snaps.

A cascade of birdseed rains down on Gregory like nature’s confetti.

A beat.

Birds descend immediately, pecking at him.

Gregory stands perfectly still, eyes wide, as if playing dead will help.

Topper watches, expression unreadable.

**TOPPER**

You’re bleeding patriotism.

Gregory swats at birds, trying to remain professional.

**GREGORY**

Harley—please.

Topper studies him. Then glances at Rivera.

**TOPPER**

You drive him up here on purpose?

Rivera shrugs.

**RIVERA**

He said it was “a short hike.”

Gregory pulls a sealed envelope from inside his jacket, holds it out with reverence.

**GREGORY**

This is your official reinstatement offer.

Topper doesn’t take it.

**GREGORY (CONT’D)**

And… there’s something else.

Gregory hesitates, then produces a newspaper clipping—old, folded, worn. He hands it over.

Topper takes it, unfolds it.

INSERT: A headline about Topper’s father. “QUESTIONS REMAIN.” “COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION.”

Topper’s eyes harden.

The wind seems louder now.

**TOPPER**

They never stopped.

**GREGORY**

No.

(soft)

They didn’t.

Topper folds the clipping slowly. His hands are steady, but his face isn’t.

He looks up.

**TOPPER**

If I come back… it’s not for medals.

**GREGORY**

It’s for justice.

Topper holds Gregory’s gaze.

**TOPPER**

It’s for my father.

A long beat.

Gregory nods, relieved—too relieved.

He turns, calls out to Rivera.

**GREGORY**

He’s in! Pack it up!

Rivera doesn’t move.

Topper hasn’t said yes.

Topper steps closer to Gregory.

**TOPPER**

I didn’t agree.

Gregory freezes.

**GREGORY**

You didn’t?

Topper gestures toward the envelope.

**TOPPER**

I said why I’d do it. Not that I would.

Gregory swallows. Thinks fast.

He smiles, too bright.

**GREGORY**

What if I told you…

(leans in)

…they named a training maneuver after you.

Topper squints.

**TOPPER**

They did?

**GREGORY**

Yes.

Topper waits.

**GREGORY (CONT’D)**

It’s called “The Harley.”

**TOPPER**

What is it?

Gregory improvises.

**GREGORY**

It’s when you fly directly at danger… and then at the last second…

(beat)

…you do something very brave.

Topper stares.

Rivera adds, without emotion:

**RIVERA**

It’s also when you lose your lunch.

Topper almost smiles.

Almost.

He looks out at the sky again—clear, cold, endless.

**TOPPER**

Give me one reason I shouldn’t stay here.

Gregory thinks. Then answers honestly.

**GREGORY**

Because you’re not at peace.

Topper absorbs that.

A beat.

Then he steps inside the cabin.

Gregory brightens, assumes victory.

**GREGORY (CONT’D)**

I’ll take that as a yes!

Rivera mutters:

**RIVERA**

He’s getting his coat.

### INT. TOPPER’S CABIN — CONTINUOUS

Spartan. A bed, a table, a small mirror.

Topper opens a drawer. Inside: an old FLIGHT PATCH, worn smooth.

He runs his thumb over it.

He looks at his reflection. The man staring back is tired.

Topper takes a breath.

Then, with resolve, he grabs a DUFFEL BAG.

As he turns, we see a framed photo: Topper’s father in uniform.

Topper pauses.

**TOPPER**

(under his breath)

I’m coming.

The wind outside picks up, rattling the window like applause.

### EXT. CABIN — MOMENTS LATER

Topper exits with the duffel.

Gregory stands by the jeep, trying to brush birdseed off his uniform. Birds still follow him like he owes them money.

Topper approaches.

**TOPPER**

If this is a trap—

**GREGORY**

It’s not a trap.

A beat.

Gregory points at Rivera.

**GREGORY (CONT’D)**

He’s the trap guy. I’m the invitation guy.

Rivera sighs.

Topper climbs into the jeep.

Gregory rushes to the passenger side, opens the door—

—and the door falls off in his hand.

He stares at it.

Topper looks over.

**TOPPER**

National security.

Gregory forces a smile, tosses the door into the back.

**GREGORY**

We’re on a budget.

Rivera starts the engine.

The jeep lurches forward.

Gregory, half inside, scrambles and tumbles into the seat.

They drive off down the mountain path, leaving the cabin behind.

Topper looks back once.

The cabin grows small in the distance.

His face is calm, but his eyes are at war.

## CUT TO:

### EXT. SKY — DAY

A jet ROARS overhead, slicing through the clouds.

Topper’s gaze follows it.

We HOLD on his face: the past returning, the mission beginning.

## FADE OUT.

**END OF CHAPTER 1 SCENE**

Scene 2

## SCREENPLAY — *HOT SHOTS!* (Spoof War/Action/Comedy)

### Scene(s) based on Chapter 2: “A Commander with a Talent for Disaster”

**FADE IN:**

### EXT. AIR FORCE BASE – FRONT GATE – DAY

A huge sign: **“WELCOME TO SAN VALERIO AIR FORCE BASE — HOME OF THE ELITE.”**

Under it, smaller sign: **“PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ELITE.”**

A military JEEP rolls up. At the wheel: **TOPPER HARLEY (30s)**, handsome, haunted, trying to look unbothered.

The GUARD leans in, stern.

**GUARD**

Name?

**TOPPER**

Topper Harley.

The guard squints, then checks a clipboard.

**GUARD**

Any relation to—?

**TOPPER**

Yes.

A beat. The guard’s face softens into pity, then hardens into judgment.

**GUARD**

Pop the trunk.

Topper pops it. Inside: one duffel bag, a flight helmet… and an entirely unnecessary amount of pinecones.

**GUARD (CONT’D)**

Sir… why the pinecones?

**TOPPER**

They’re for grounding. My therapist says I should carry nature with me.

The guard stares, not sure if this is a confession or a threat.

**GUARD**

All right. Welcome back to the Air Force. Try not to… you know.

The gate opens. Topper drives through.

### EXT. BASE PARADE GROUND – MOMENTS LATER

A CEREMONIAL WELCOME is underway. A small marching band plays something heroic, slightly off-key.

A banner: **“OPERATION SLEEPING PANTHER — KICKOFF CEREMONY!”**

Topper parks and steps out. Pilots in crisp uniforms stand in a row, pretending not to stare at him.

At the center: **COMMANDER BLOCK (60s)**, a walking museum of medals. He radiates confidence like a lightbulb wired incorrectly.

Block strides forward.

**BLOCK**

Lieutenant Sean “Topper” Harley!

Topper snaps to attention.

**TOPPER**

Commander.

Block reaches to shake his hand—misjudges distance—accidentally shakes Topper’s sleeve instead. He corrects, shakes the actual hand with too much force.

**BLOCK**

We’re thrilled to have you. The best of the best. The cream of the crop.

Block leans in, stage-whisper.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

We also invited the crop. Some of them are here.

Topper tries to smile. It comes out like a grimace.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Now, I’d give you the grand tour, but I already did and I got lost. Twice. On the runway.

He gestures grandly toward a line of… **CEREMONIAL CANNONS**.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

We even brought out the traditional salute cannons.

Block steps backward—right onto a cannon’s wheel. It rolls.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Oh! Look at that. It’s— it’s mobile.

Block windmills his arms, falls backward—**DIRECTLY INTO THE CANNON BARREL**.

A horrified silence.

Topper and the PILOTS freeze. The band keeps playing, because it’s the only thing they know how to do.

From inside the cannon, Block’s voice echoes.

**BLOCK (O.S.)**

I’m fine! I’m fine! I meant to inspect it from the inside.

Topper rushes over.

**TOPPER**

Commander, don’t move.

**BLOCK (O.S.)**

I wasn’t planning to. I can’t.

Topper grabs the cannon’s rim, tries to pull Block out. The cannon shifts.

A nearby TECHNICIAN notices a lit fuse.

**TECHNICIAN**

Uh… sir? The fuse is—

**BOOM!**

The cannon fires with a thunderous BLAST.

A beat.

The cannon barrel is now empty.

Everyone looks up.

### EXT. SKY ABOVE PARADE GROUND – CONTINUOUS

Commander Block sails through the air like a dignified lawn dart, hat still on, medals glinting.

He waves.

**BLOCK**

That was… invigorating!

### EXT. PARADE GROUND – CONTINUOUS

Block lands in a giant ceremonial CAKE marked “WELCOME TOPPER,” exploding frosting everywhere.

Topper is splattered head to toe.

The band hits a triumphant note like this was planned.

Block sits up, frosting in his eyebrows.

**BLOCK**

Harley! I’ve always said: if you can’t make an entrance… make an impact.

Topper wipes frosting off his cheek.

**TOPPER**

Yes, sir.

A pilot in the line snickers. Another pilot elbows him to stop.

Block stands, brushing himself off—smearing frosting like war paint.

**BLOCK**

Gentlemen! This is Lieutenant Harley. He’s here to help us win a war the politicians started, the taxpayers funded, and the paperwork will finish.

No one laughs. Block laughs alone.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Tough crowd. Good. You’ll need thick skin. Thin skin gets you killed. Or promoted.

He turns to Topper, suddenly serious—almost competent.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Your father flew in this outfit.

Topper’s jaw tightens.

**TOPPER**

I know.

Block nods, then immediately loses the moment.

**BLOCK**

Fine man. Terrible parallel parker.

Topper blinks.

**TOPPER**

Sir… I’m here to fly.

**BLOCK**

Excellent. Then you’ll be happy to know we’ve upgraded our training systems.

Block points toward a building labeled **“ADVANCED FLIGHT SIMULATOR”**.

A smaller sign beneath: **“DO NOT MICROWAVE FISH IN THIS FACILITY.”**

### INT. SIMULATOR BUILDING – BRIEFING ROOM – DAY

Pilots sit in rows. Topper sits near the front, stiff.

At the front stands **LT. KENT GREGORY (30s)**, smug ace, perfect hair, smile like a billboard.

Kent eyes Topper with practiced disdain.

**KENT**

Well, look who’s back. Harley.

Topper keeps his eyes forward.

**TOPPER**

Gregory.

Kent leans in, voice low.

**KENT**

You here to clear your name… or repeat history?

Topper’s fist tightens, then relaxes. He chooses calm.

**TOPPER**

I’m here to do my job.

Kent smiles wider.

**KENT**

Good. Just remember—up there, gravity doesn’t care about family legacies.

Topper finally looks at him.

**TOPPER**

Neither do I.

Kent’s smile falters—just for a moment.

At the front, Block clicks a REMOTE. A projector screen drops… then drops too far, smacking him in the face.

**BLOCK**

Ow.

(beat)

All right! Today we begin training for Operation Sleeping Panther.

A slide appears: a majestic PANTHER… sleeping on a couch.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

This panther represents our enemy: lazy, unpredictable, and possibly house-trained.

A HAND raises—**PILOT #1**.

**PILOT #1**

Sir, is the enemy… a panther?

**BLOCK**

No. The enemy is a hostile regime with a sophisticated air defense network.

He clicks. The slide changes to… a photo of a NETWORK CABLE.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

This is the network.

He clicks again. Now a photo of AIR DEFENSE MISSILES.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

And these… are the defense.

The pilots stare. Topper blinks slowly.

**TOPPER**

Sir… where are we deploying?

Block clicks. A map appears—upside down.

**BLOCK**

Right here.

He points confidently to the ocean.

A TECH SERGEANT approaches, whispers.

**TECH SERGEANT**

Sir… the map is inverted.

Block nods like he knew that.

**BLOCK**

Of course it is. That’s why the enemy never sees us coming.

The pilots exchange looks: *Are we doomed?*

### INT. SIMULATOR ROOM – LATER

A high-tech simulator pod. Topper climbs in.

Block stands at a control panel with too many buttons.

**BLOCK**

This simulator recreates real combat scenarios.

He presses a button. A KLAXON blares. Lights flash.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

That’s normal.

He presses another. The simulator screen flickers… and displays a COOKING SHOW.

On screen: a cheerful CHEF flambés something.

**CHEF (ON SCREEN)**

And now we add just a touch of danger—

Topper’s headset crackles.

**TOPPER**

Uh, Commander? I’m seeing… sautéed danger.

Block frowns, presses more buttons.

The cooking show cuts to a NATURE DOCUMENTARY: wolves running in slow motion.

**NARRATOR (ON SCREEN)**

The lone wolf returns to the pack…

Topper stiffens at the words.

Kent watches from behind, arms crossed, enjoying this.

**KENT**

Looks like the simulator knows you.

Topper ignores him, eyes forward.

Block presses a final button labeled **“DO NOT PRESS.”**

**BLOCK**

We’ll just reset it.

The simulator jolts violently. Topper is shaken like a soda can.

**TOPPER**

Sir!

**BLOCK**

Stay calm, Harley! In real combat, you won’t have time to be comfortable!

The simulator stops abruptly. Smoke rises.

A beat.

The cooking show returns. The Chef smiles.

**CHEF (ON SCREEN)**

If your pilot begins to smoke, reduce heat immediately.

Topper climbs out, hair slightly singed, expression deadpan.

**TOPPER**

I feel… prepared.

Block claps him on the shoulder—too hard.

**BLOCK**

That’s the spirit! Tomorrow we fly for real.

Topper looks past Block, out a window at the runway where jets gleam in the sun.

Kent steps beside him, voice soft but sharp.

**KENT**

Just don’t choke up there, Harley.

Topper watches the jets, jaw set.

**TOPPER**

I’m not the one who’s worried.

Kent smirks, walks off.

Block squints at the smoking simulator.

**BLOCK**

We should probably… fix that.

He presses a button. The building’s FIRE SPRINKLERS activate—drenching everyone.

Block smiles, soaked.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Good. Now we’re fireproof.

Topper stands in the rain of sprinklers, water dripping from his brow like a baptism he didn’t ask for.

He exhales—half laugh, half sigh—then looks up at the sky.

**TOPPER**

(quietly, to himself)

Let’s do this.

**CUT TO:**

**END OF SCENE.**

Scene 3

## SCREENPLAY — “HOT SHOTS!: CLEARING SKIES”

### Scene(s) Based on Chapter 3: “Valerie and the Unusual Talent”

—

### INT. AIR BASE — FLUORESCENT HALLWAY — DAY

A long, sterile hallway. Government beige. The kind of place where dreams go to get stamped and filed.

TOPPER HARLEY (30s), handsome in a slightly haunted way, walks with a pilot’s swagger that keeps trying to collapse into a flinch.

Two PILOTS pass, whispering loudly on purpose.

**PILOT #1**

That’s him. Harley. The curse with cheekbones.

**PILOT #2**

My uncle flew with his dad. Said the plane practically fell out of the sky to get away.

Topper keeps walking like he didn’t hear. He absolutely heard.

At the end of the hall: a door with a crooked placard.

**“CIVILIAN PERFORMANCE CONSULTANT — DR. VALERIE”**

(“DR.” is handwritten, misspelled, then corrected.)

Topper pauses. Straightens his jacket. Practices a neutral expression that comes out as “mildly guilty.”

He knocks.

A beat.

**VALERIE (O.S.)**

Come in.

—

### INT. VALERIE’S OFFICE — DAY

Not military. Warm light. A few plants trying their best. Charts on the wall: respiration, stress response, “OPTIMAL PILOT OUTPUT” written like a threat.

VALERIE (early 30s), sharp-eyed, composed, European accent soft as a warning, stands over a desk arranging files with surgical precision.

Topper enters.

**TOPPER**

Dr. Valerie…?

Valerie looks up, studies him like a weather system.

**VALERIE**

Valerie. Doctor is… formal. And usually wrong.

Topper nods, unsure whether he’s been insulted or welcomed.

**TOPPER**

Right. Valerie. I’m— I’m Topper Harley.

Valerie’s eyes flick briefly to his file. The name sits there like a loaded weapon.

**VALERIE**

I know.

A tense beat.

Topper tries to smile. It comes out like a grimace wearing a tie.

**TOPPER**

So… you’re here to optimize performance.

**VALERIE**

Yes.

**TOPPER**

Great. Mine could use… optimizing.

Valerie’s gaze doesn’t move.

**VALERIE**

Your performance is not the problem.

Topper shifts, defensive.

**TOPPER**

Then what is?

Valerie taps the file.

**VALERIE**

The story you keep telling yourself. It is heavy. It pulls you down.

Topper swallows. His voice tries to stay casual and fails.

**TOPPER**

You read my file.

**VALERIE**

I read everything. That is my job.

A beat. Topper takes it in.

Then—

A LOW, DEEP RUMBLE.

Like distant thunder.

Topper freezes. Looks toward the ceiling.

**TOPPER**

Was that…?

Valerie doesn’t blink.

**VALERIE**

No.

Another rumble. This one has a strange… musicality. Almost like a tuba warming up.

Topper’s eyes widen.

**TOPPER**

Is there— is there construction?

Valerie’s cheeks tighten. She exhales through her nose.

**VALERIE**

My stomach.

Topper stares.

**TOPPER**

Your stomach.

Valerie nods as if confirming a weather report.

**VALERIE**

It is… unusually talented.

Topper tries to respond with dignity. He cannot find any.

**TOPPER**

I didn’t know stomachs could be talented.

Valerie shrugs.

**VALERIE**

Most are not.

Topper laughs once, surprised. It’s the first real sound he’s made all day.

Valerie watches him— pleased, but careful not to show it.

—

### INT. BASE CAFETERIA — LATER

A crowded, loud military cafeteria. Men shouting over trays. Coffee that looks like it’s been through combat.

Topper and Valerie sit at a small table. Topper has a tray of food he doesn’t trust.

Valerie has tea. Of course she has tea.

A WAITER drops a stack of plates nearby— CRASH.

No one reacts. It’s normal here.

Topper gestures to the chaos.

**TOPPER**

This place feels like it’s always one mistake away from a headline.

**VALERIE**

It is.

Topper pokes his mashed potatoes like they owe him money.

**TOPPER**

So… what exactly do you do for pilots?

Valerie leans in slightly, professional.

**VALERIE**

I monitor stress. I teach breathing. Focus. Control.

Topper nods, trying to look like a man who controls things.

**TOPPER**

Control. Right. I’m great at control.

Valerie raises an eyebrow.

**VALERIE**

You have nightmares.

Topper nearly chokes on air.

**TOPPER**

I— I don’t—

**VALERIE**

You grind your teeth. Your shoulders are always up like you are expecting an attack. And you flinch when someone says “father.”

Topper sits back, caught.

**TOPPER**

You’re good.

Valerie’s stomach emits a short, sharp sound— like a trumpet doing a rude comment.

Topper glances at her midsection.

**TOPPER**

Your stomach agrees.

Valerie’s face hardens.

**VALERIE**

It has opinions.

Topper smiles despite himself.

Across the room, the SMUG ACE PILOT (late 20s, perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect cruelty) watches them. He leans to his buddies.

**SMUG ACE**

Look at Harley. Already got himself a civilian fan club.

(beat)

Maybe she can optimize his crash landing.

The buddies snicker.

Topper hears it. His smile fades.

Valerie notices.

**VALERIE**

Do not listen.

**TOPPER**

Hard not to. It’s like they installed speakers in my shame.

Valerie studies him with unexpected softness.

**VALERIE**

You are not your father’s last moment.

Topper’s jaw tightens.

**TOPPER**

Everyone here thinks I am.

Valerie holds his gaze.

**VALERIE**

Then they are lazy.

A beat. That lands.

Topper looks down, quieter.

**TOPPER**

I came back to fix it. Clear the name.

(beat)

But I don’t even know what the truth is anymore.

Valerie reaches across the table, touches his hand— small, steady.

**VALERIE**

Truth is not a rumor. It is what you do next.

Her stomach GROWLS again, long and dramatic— like a whale singing a sad song.

Topper stares, half concerned, half amazed.

**TOPPER**

Is it… okay?

Valerie, dead serious:

**VALERIE**

It is emotional.

Topper laughs. Valerie almost smiles.

Almost.

—

### EXT. BASE RUNWAY — SUNSET

Jets sit lined up like sleeping predators. The sky is orange, bruised at the edges.

Topper and Valerie walk along the runway fence. The air smells like fuel and decisions.

Topper looks out at the planes.

**TOPPER**

You ever fly?

**VALERIE**

No.

**TOPPER**

Smart.

Valerie stops, turns to him.

**VALERIE**

Topper… why do you fly?

Topper doesn’t answer immediately. He watches a mechanic climb down from a ladder. Somewhere, an engine coughs.

**TOPPER**

Because when I’m up there… it’s quiet.

(beat)

And because if I don’t… then maybe they’re right.

Valerie steps closer.

**VALERIE**

And if they are wrong?

Topper meets her eyes.

**TOPPER**

Then I get my life back.

A beat hangs between them. The runway lights flicker on, one by one, like a slow decision.

Valerie’s stomach makes a small, almost shy sound.

Topper glances down.

**TOPPER**

What’s that one mean?

Valerie exhales, finally letting a real smile slip through.

**VALERIE**

That one… is approval.

Topper laughs softly, relieved by something he can’t name.

He leans in. Valerie doesn’t move away.

They kiss— gentle, tentative—

Suddenly, a LOUD SIREN BLARES.

Both of them jump apart.

A nearby AIRMAN sprints past, panicked.

**AIRMAN**

False alarm! False alarm! It’s— it’s the new warning system! It’s stuck!

Commander Block’s voice echoes over a loudspeaker, muffled and confused.

**COMMANDER BLOCK (V.O.)**

Attention! This is a test of the emergency—

(beat)

—of the… emergency thing.

(long beat)

If this were a real emergency, you would be dead already.

Topper and Valerie stare at each other.

**TOPPER**

Romantic place you work at.

Valerie nods, as if noting a clinical symptom.

**VALERIE**

It is… hostile to intimacy.

Topper takes her hand again, firmer this time.

**TOPPER**

Then we’ll have to be stubborn.

Valerie’s stomach rumbles— low, satisfied, like distant applause.

Topper looks down at it.

**TOPPER**

Tell your stomach I said thank you.

Valerie starts walking with him, hand in hand.

**VALERIE**

It heard you.

They move along the fence as jets sit quietly— for now.

The siren continues to wail, absurd and endless, as the sun goes down like a curtain.

**FADE OUT.**

Scene 4

## SCREENPLAY — “HOT SHOTS!: CLEARING SKIES”

### Scene(s) based on Chapter 4: “Training Day, or How to Lose a Jet in Plain Sight”

**FADE IN:**

### EXT. AIR BASE RUNWAY – MORNING

A crisp sunrise. Jets lined up like chrome sharks. Ground crew scurry with clipboards and panic.

A giant banner reads: **“WELCOME TO OPERATION: SOMETHING IMPORTANT”**

Under it, smaller letters: **“(SPELLING TBD)”**

TOPPER HARLEY (early 30s, handsome, haunted, trying to look unbothered) walks toward the flight line. He wears aviators like armor.

Two PILOTS jog past, chanting cadence—except it’s off-beat and mostly about breakfast.

### PILOT #1

Left, left, left-right-left—

Who wants eggs? I want eggs—

### PILOT #2

If I die today, tell my mom—

She still owes me twenty bucks—

Topper pauses, unsure if this is a tradition or a cry for help.

A MECHANIC salutes him, then accidentally salutes with a wrench and clocks himself in the forehead.

### MECHANIC

Ow—sir! Good morning, sir!

Topper nods, polite.

### TOPPER

Morning. You okay?

### MECHANIC

Never better. I can taste colors.

Topper keeps walking.

—

### EXT. TARMAC – CONTINUOUS

COMMANDER BLOCK (60s, decorated, confident, and somehow always seconds from catastrophe) strides in with a swagger. He carries a coffee mug that says **“WORLD’S BEST BRAIN SURGEON.”**

He stops beside a jet and addresses the assembled pilots.

They stand at attention. One of them is chewing gum like it’s a job.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

Men! Today we train for combat. The enemy is ruthless, cunning, and—

(leans in)

—may or may not exist.

The pilots glance at each other.

### COMMANDER BLOCK (CONT’D)

But that’s not important. What’s important is readiness. Discipline. Precision.

(beat)

And always… always…

(he squints at his notes)

…hydrate.

He lifts his mug dramatically—then the handle snaps off. Coffee spills down his uniform like a slow-motion defeat.

He doesn’t react. Just keeps talking, soaked.

### COMMANDER BLOCK (CONT’D)

Now! We’ll begin with simulator drills.

He gestures grandly—his elbow hits a nearby GROUND CREWMAN’s clipboard, which flies into a jet intake.

A WHINE. A CLUNK. The jet coughs like it swallowed a shoe.

### GROUND CREWMAN

Was that… important?

### COMMANDER BLOCK

Not if we don’t tell anybody.

—

### INT. BRIEFING ROOM – LATER

A cramped room. A huge MAP of “ENEMY TERRITORY” hangs on the wall. It’s rolled up halfway like it’s shy.

VALERIE (late 20s/early 30s, smart, calm, with a quiet intensity and an even quieter stomach—until it isn’t) stands near a projector.

Topper sits among pilots. Across from him: KENT GREGORY (30s, smug ace, teeth too white, smile too sharp).

Kent flips a pen like he was born in slow motion.

### KENT

So, Harley. Back in the saddle.

### TOPPER

Back in the… chair.

Kent smiles wider.

### KENT

I hear your father was a great pilot.

A beat. Topper’s jaw tightens.

### KENT (CONT’D)

Right up until he wasn’t.

The room goes quiet.

Valerie clicks the projector on, saving the moment.

A slide appears: **“PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION”**

Under it: a photo of a man doing yoga on a fighter jet.

### VALERIE

Gentlemen. Combat performance is not only skill. It’s stress management, focus, and physiology.

A PILOT raises his hand.

### PILOT #3

Is physiology… like, the study of fish?

Valerie blinks once.

### VALERIE

No.

Her stomach emits a low, resonant **GROOOOAN**—like a distant foghorn.

The pilots stiffen, looking around, alarmed.

Kent smirks.

### KENT

Was that… the projector?

Valerie doesn’t flinch.

### VALERIE

That was my stomach. It’s… unusually talented.

Topper tries not to laugh. Fails. It comes out as a strangled cough.

Valerie catches his eye—half amused, half warning.

### VALERIE (CONT’D)

Now. When you’re under pressure, your body will betray you.

(beat)

Some more loudly than others.

She clicks to the next slide: **“BREATHE.”**

Under it: a cartoon lung wearing sunglasses.

Topper leans back, still tense from Kent’s jab.

—

### INT. SIMULATOR HANGAR – AFTERNOON

A row of flight simulators like arcade machines from a militarized carnival.

A sign reads: **“SIMULATOR ROOM – DO NOT EAT CHILI INSIDE.”**

Topper climbs into one simulator cockpit. A TECH plugs in cables.

### TECH

Okay, Captain Harley, this is cutting-edge technology.

### TOPPER

Looks like a vending machine with feelings.

### TECH

It’s very sensitive. Be gentle.

Topper straps in. The simulator HUMS to life.

On a monitor outside, Commander Block watches with a headset on—backwards.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

(over intercom, muffled)

Harley, you are clear for takeoff. Remember: up is… the other direction.

Topper exhales, focuses.

The simulator screen flickers.

Instead of a runway, it shows a COOKING SHOW.

A cheerful HOST waves.

### COOKING HOST (ON SCREEN)

Today we’re making a delicate soufflé—perfect for entertaining!

Topper stares.

### TOPPER

Uh… Control?

Commander Block taps his headset, which makes a squeal.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

Harley, I’m picking up heavy enemy jamming.

### TOPPER

That’s… a soufflé.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

Exactly. Very advanced.

The simulator suddenly lurches, throwing Topper forward.

Outside, the TECH frowns.

### TECH

That’s not supposed to do that.

### TOPPER (IN SIM)

My plane is trying to bake!

The cooking show host sprinkles sugar. The simulator shakes harder.

### COOKING HOST (ON SCREEN)

Now, fold gently—do not overmix—

Topper grips the stick.

### TOPPER

I’m not overmixing anything!

The simulator abruptly switches to a DOGFIGHT SCENARIO—too fast, too intense.

Topper’s instincts kick in. He flies beautifully, threading through targets.

Kent watches from nearby, arms crossed, irritated.

### KENT

(to himself)

Of course he’s good.

Topper nails a perfect maneuver—then the simulator abruptly plays a ROMANTIC SAXOPHONE TRACK.

Topper’s face tightens.

### TOPPER

Why is there music?

The simulator screen briefly shows TWO PIANOS in a smoky lounge—like a different movie entirely.

### PIANIST (ON SCREEN)

Take it, baby.

Topper’s simulator jerks again, almost throwing him out.

### TECH

Oh no.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

(over intercom)

Harley, you’re doing great. Whatever you do—don’t press the red button.

Topper looks down. There is only one button. It is red. It is labeled: **“RED BUTTON.”**

The simulator alarms BLARE.

Instinctively, Topper presses it.

Outside, all the lights in the hangar go out.

A beat of silence.

Then: every simulator starts up at once, shaking violently like angry washing machines.

### TECH

Who wired these to the building?!

Commander Block steps back, trips over a cable, and somehow ends up wearing a parachute.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

Nobody panic! I have logged hundreds of hours in simulated emergencies!

He pulls the parachute cord by accident.

It DEPLOYS inside the hangar, yanking him upward into a dangling, humiliating cocoon.

### COMMANDER BLOCK (CONT’D)

(muffled)

This is… not what I meant!

Topper finally yanks off his helmet, breathless.

Kent laughs—sharp and short.

### KENT

Nice flying, Harley. Real professional.

Topper climbs out, eyes locked on Kent.

### TOPPER

Say what you want about me.

(beat)

Leave my father out of it.

Kent steps closer.

### KENT

Why? He’s the reason you’re here.

The legend. The disgrace.

Depends who’s telling it.

Topper’s fists clench.

Valerie enters from the side door, taking in the chaos: shaking simulators, dangling Commander, frantic techs.

Her stomach emits a small, disapproving **GURGLE**—like it’s judging the room.

### VALERIE

What happened?

### TECH

The simulator system… had a nervous breakdown.

Valerie looks at Topper—sees the anger, the shame, the strain.

### VALERIE

(to Topper, gently)

You’re holding your breath.

Topper doesn’t answer. He looks past her, out toward the runway, where real jets wait.

### TOPPER

If I stop holding it… I might fall apart.

A beat.

Valerie steps closer, calm as a runway light.

### VALERIE

Then fall apart later.

Right now, breathe.

Topper tries. A slow inhale.

Kent watches, expression unreadable—then he turns away like he’s bored, but it’s too fast to be casual.

—

### EXT. RUNWAY – LATE AFTERNOON

Jets taxi. The day’s final exercise: live training flight.

Topper walks toward his aircraft. A CREW CHIEF gives him a thumbs up—then accidentally drops a TOOLBOX, which bursts open like a metal piñata.

Commander Block, now free from the parachute but still tangled in straps, approaches with forced dignity.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

Harley! Today, you’ll fly with your wingman and demonstrate teamwork.

He gestures to a pilot standing nearby: a nervous KID with a helmet too big.

### NERVOUS KID

Hi, sir. I’m… I’m your wingman.

Topper nods, softening.

### TOPPER

What’s your name?

### NERVOUS KID

Kowalski. But everyone calls me “Hey You.”

### TOPPER

All right, Hey You. Stick close.

Commander Block leans in, confidential.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

And Harley?

### TOPPER

Yes, sir?

### COMMANDER BLOCK

Try not to…

(he searches for the word)

…die.

Topper stares.

### TOPPER

That’s the plan.

Commander Block smiles, pleased with himself—then walks directly into a parked ladder.

### COMMANDER BLOCK

(cheerful, to the ladder)

Permission to come aboard!

Topper climbs into his jet. The canopy lowers.

Inside the cockpit, his breathing steadies. But his eyes are stormy.

On the runway, Kent climbs into his own jet. He looks over at Topper, lips curling.

### KENT (OVER RADIO)

Try to keep up, Harley.

Topper flicks his switch, voice calm.

### TOPPER (OVER RADIO)

Try to keep quiet, Gregory.

Engines ROAR. The jets surge forward.

Topper’s eyes harden—not with fear, but with determination.

### TOPPER (V.O.)

Dad… I’m not here to be forgiven.

I’m here to fly.

**CUT TO:**

### EXT. SKY – CONTINUOUS

Two jets lift into the open blue, climbing fast.

Below them, the base shrinks—tiny, absurd, and deadly serious all at once.

**FADE OUT.**

Scene 5

## Screenplay — Scene(s) from Chapter 5: “The Mission Begins (and Everything Goes Wrong Immediately)”

**TITLE:** *HOT SHOTS: CLEARING THE NAME*

**GENRE:** Action / Comedy / War (Spoof)

**SETTING:** U.S. Navy airbase + aircraft carrier + skies over enemy territory. Dawn.

—

### INT. BRIEFING ROOM — PRE-DAWN

A giant MAP on an easel. It’s glossy, dramatic, and slightly curled like it wants to escape.

COMMANDER BLOCK stands at the front with a pointer stick, wearing too many medals. He taps the map with confidence.

**BLOCK**

Gentlemen. Today we fly into danger. Into history. Into… (squints) the part of the map that keeps rolling up.

The map curls tighter. Block slaps it. It slaps back, curling more.

TOPPER HARLEY sits with the pilots. Calm face, tight eyes.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Your mission is simple. We go in, we hit the target, we come home heroes.

He points to a red circle.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

This is the enemy installation.

A HAND raises. It’s PILOT #1, eager and dim.

**PILOT #1**

Sir, what’s this blue part?

Block looks.

**BLOCK**

That’s… the ocean.

**PILOT #1**

Are we… flying over it?

Block thinks hard, like the question is philosophical.

**BLOCK**

Not if we do everything right.

The room nods like that makes sense.

Block flips a chart. It’s upside down. He doesn’t notice.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Rules of engagement: Do not engage unless engaged. If you are engaged, disengage, then re-engage. If you become enraged, count to ten.

TOPPER leans toward KENT GREGORY (the smug ace). Kent’s smile is weaponized.

**KENT**

Try not to embarrass your father out there, Harley.

Topper’s jaw tightens.

**TOPPER**

Try not to die in a way that requires paperwork.

Block claps once, loudly, like he’s ending a children’s show.

**BLOCK**

All right. Questions?

A long beat.

A PILOT in the back raises his hand.

**PILOT #2**

Sir, are we the good guys?

Block beams.

**BLOCK**

Absolutely. We have the nicer uniforms.

CUT TO:

—

### EXT. FLIGHT LINE — DAWN

Jets lined up like chrome sharks. The sun rises with cinematic seriousness.

GROUND CREW hustle. One CREW CHIEF carries a wrench in his mouth.

Topper walks toward his jet. A mechanic salutes him, then drops the salute like it burned.

VALERIE appears near the hangar, holding a clipboard. Calm, composed, and watching Topper like she’s trying to read a storm.

Topper stops.

**TOPPER**

You shouldn’t be out here.

**VALERIE**

I’m not “out here.” I’m “near here.” It’s safer.

A beat. Her stomach emits a low, haunting sound—like a distant whale singing in a tunnel.

Topper glances at her midsection, then back to her face, trying to be polite.

**TOPPER**

Was that… your stomach?

**VALERIE**

It’s nervous. It does that when it senses danger.

**TOPPER**

So do I.

She steps closer.

**VALERIE**

You don’t have to prove anything today.

Topper looks past her at the jets, the crews, the ritual of war dressed as ceremony.

**TOPPER**

I’m not proving. I’m… correcting the record.

Her stomach GROWLS again—this time like a small thunderclap.

**VALERIE**

It disagrees with your tone.

Topper almost smiles. Almost.

**TOPPER**

Tell it I’ll be careful.

**VALERIE**

Careful is a skill. Not a promise.

They hold eye contact a fraction too long. Then—

A LOUD CLANG. A crewman drops a tool cart. It rolls directly into a jet.

**CREWMAN**

Sorry! Sorry! That cart’s got a mind of its own!

Topper and Valerie break apart, reality returning with a squeak of wheels.

Topper climbs the ladder to his cockpit.

**VALERIE (calling up)**

Topper!

He pauses.

**VALERIE (CONT’D)**

Come back.

Topper nods once—small, sincere—then lowers his visor.

CUT TO:

—

### EXT. RUNWAY — MOMENTS LATER

Jets taxi in formation.

Commander Block stands near the runway with two SIGNAL FLAGS, like he’s directing a parade.

He waves. The jets move.

Block waves the opposite direction. The jets stop.

Block waves both flags at once. The jets… hesitate, confused.

**BLOCK**

No, no—go! GO!

He steps back—directly onto a rolling fuel hose. His feet tangle. He windmills his arms, still holding the flags, and falls backward into a stack of tires.

The tires topple like dominoes.

A PILOT in a cockpit watches, deadpan.

**PILOT (into radio)**

Tower, is the commander… okay?

**TOWER (V.O.)**

Define “okay.”

Topper’s jet lines up for takeoff.

**TOPPER (into radio)**

Harley ready.

**KENT (into radio)**

Try to keep up, Harley.

**TOPPER**

Try to keep quiet, Gregory.

The engines ROAR. The jets launch.

As Topper lifts—

A BIRD slams into the intake of the jet behind him.

The cockpit fills with FEATHERS like a pillow exploded.

**PILOT #3 (into radio, coughing)**

I’M BEING ATTACKED BY A CHICKEN!

**TOPPER**

It’s a bird strike. Maintain altitude.

**PILOT #3**

IT’S STILL IN HERE!

The pilot punches at feathers. A wing flaps against the canopy.

CUT TO:

—

### INT. AIRCRAFT CARRIER — COMMAND CENTER — SAME

Commander Block sits at a console, headset on, trying to look military.

A TECH points to a screen.

**TECH**

Sir, you’re on the intercom.

Block nods like he understands, then speaks into a stapler.

**BLOCK**

This is Block to all aircraft. You are clear to… (checks notes) be brave.

The tech gently takes the stapler away and hands him the microphone.

**BLOCK (CONT’D)**

Right. Microphone. Brave into microphone.

He presses a large red button labeled **DO NOT PRESS**.

A KLAXON sounds. Red lights flash.

**TECH**

Sir! That’s the—

**BLOCK**

The “Do Not Press” button?

**TECH**

Yes!

**BLOCK**

Then why is it so pressable?

CUT TO:

—

### EXT. SKY — OVER OPEN WATER — MORNING

The jets slice through clouds. Dramatic, heroic… until the radio becomes chaos.

**PILOT #3 (V.O.)**

I think the bird is now my co-pilot!

**PILOT #1 (V.O.)**

I’m low on fuel.

**TOPPER**

We just took off.

**PILOT #1 (V.O.)**

I worry fast.

Topper breathes, steadying himself.

**TOPPER (into radio)**

All aircraft, tighten formation. Focus up.

Kent’s jet edges close, showing off.

**KENT (V.O.)**

You’re tense, Harley. Maybe your father’s ghost is riding shotgun.

Topper’s hands tighten on the controls.

A beat—then Topper’s HUD flickers. For a second, the display shows a COOKING SHOW.

A cheerful HOST appears on the screen.

**TV HOST (ON HUD)**

Today we’re making a reduction sauce—

Topper blinks, then SLAPS the panel.

The HUD returns.

**TOPPER**

…What the hell.

CUT TO:

—

### EXT. ENEMY COASTLINE — LATER

The landscape changes. Jagged cliffs, desert beyond. The jets cross into hostile airspace.

The radio goes quiet. Even the jokes retreat.

Topper scans the horizon. Sweat at his temple.

Then—RADAR PINGS.

Missile locks. Enemy jets appear like angry insects.

**TOPPER (into radio)**

Bandits, twelve o’clock. This is real. Stay sharp.

The squad tightens.

A missile streaks past—too close.

**PILOT #2 (V.O.)**

They’re shooting at us!

**TOPPER**

Yes.

**PILOT #2 (V.O.)**

On purpose!

Topper banks hard. Kent follows, aggressive.

Tracer fire. Explosions in the distance. The comedy thins, but doesn’t die—it clings like duct tape.

Topper’s jet shudders from turbulence and fear.

He sees, far below—

A DESERT that looks suspiciously like a different movie. A lone FIGURE on a ridge, silhouetted, dramatic.

And—impossibly—A PIANO in the middle of nowhere.

Topper blinks.

**TOPPER**

Am I hallucinating?

**KENT (V.O.)**

Probably. Try not to crash into your childhood.

Topper’s face hardens. He dives into the fight.

CUT TO:

—

### EXT. SKY — DOGFIGHT — CONTINUOUS

Topper lines up behind an enemy jet.

He fires—HIS GUNS SPUTTER, then stop.

A warning light blinks: **AMMO INSTALLED BACKWARDS**.

Topper stares at it.

**TOPPER**

You’ve got to be kidding me.

He flips a switch labeled **FORWARD/REVERSE**. The guns resume.

The enemy jet explodes.

Topper exhales.

Then his radio crackles. Commander Block’s voice comes through, faint and muffled.

**BLOCK (V.O.)**

All aircraft, this is Block. Remember: if you see the enemy… (muffled) offer them a firm handshake—

A scuffle sound. The tech grabs the mic back.

**TECH (V.O.)**

Ignore that. Continue mission.

Topper banks, dodges another missile. His eyes are fierce now.

**TOPPER (into radio)**

Stay with me. We finish this run. We go home.

A beat. Then—

A pilot screams.

**PILOT #1 (V.O.)**

My canopy won’t close! I’m flying convertible!

Topper glances over—sure enough, the pilot’s canopy is open, wind whipping his hair like a music video.

Topper swallows irritation, focuses.

**TOPPER**

Then keep your arms inside the ride.

Topper dives toward the target zone.

The war is real now. But so is he.

SMASH CUT TO BLACK.

**END OF CHAPTER 5 SCENE ADAPTATION**