“Eh?”
“You need a distraction, right? Okay, Mick and the nerds tell me that comes down to an ECM problem. Electronic Counter-Measures,” he added quickly at Bal-Simba’s puzzled look. “You need something that will spoof them into thinking you’re coming at them from one direction when you’re really gonna hit them blind-side.” He leaned forward and put his hands on Bal-Simba’s work table, heedless of etiquette. “So we load the Colt up with all the magic it can carry and your wizards wave their wands to make it fry. I go blasting toward the Enemy, radiating magic like it was going out of style. They’ll know something is coming, but they won’t know what. It will be radiating enough magic to cover every dragon in the North.”
In spite of himself, Bal-Simba nodded.
Charlie grinned. “The best part of it is that even once they acquire me visually they still won’t know what the hell they’ve got They can’t just break off like they would with a drone.”
The big wizard grinned mirthlessly. “You mean they would continue to pursue you and try to destroy you. We cannot spare the dragons to protect you. Not a safe position, I fear.”
The old man grinned back equally mirthlessly. “It’s sporty son. Downright sporty.”
Bal-Simba looked more closely at the pilot, and thought hard. The man was apparently sincere and undoubtedly sober enough to understand what he was suggesting. Having such a strange thing at the center of the magic would indeed confuse the Enemy.
“I will see what I can do,” he told Charlie.
Dragon Leader ignored the constant boom of the sea as it crashed on the nearly vertical rock. He was not much given to conversation and there was no need as long as he kept an eye on his wingman. His wingman had climbed to the top of the pinnacle to watch for intruders. Dragon Leader surveyed the jagged fissures, overhangs and holes in the rock.
Their dragons were resting in the great crack that nearly cleaved the place in two. They were invisible, save from the proper angle at close range.
They had not sought a confrontation with the Enemy’s dragons this time. Instead they had sneaked south by a roundabout route to this place and several others similarly situated.
The Executioner was as bleak and unattractive as its name. A snag of red-black volcanic rock thrusting above the restless gray sea like a monstrous fang. All around it lay Murder Shoals, the names a tribute to the terror these places inspired in those who sailed the Freshened Sea.
Even here, as far “inland” as it was possible to get on this place, spray stung his eyes. The chill, wet air sucked the heat from his body. It was not a comfortable place, but he had known that before he came. Comfort was not one of the parameters he was interested in.
Dragon Leader nodded to himself. The place would do.
Mick was having a drink in the pilot’s bar. It was the one place in the Wizards’ Keep where he felt really comfortable—as long as Karin and the members of her squadron weren’t around.
Drinking by myself again, he thought. I gotta cut this out. It wasn’t as bad as Vegas. He wasn’t drinking as much and it was brown ale rather than whiskey—which apparently didn’t exist here—but he’d still rather be doing other things.
Part of it was that he felt like a rat and he didn’t know how to apologize, or even if the apology would be accepted if he could find a way to make it. He’d have to get Karin alone and try sometime soon, but she was avoiding him and staying down in the pilots’ quarters.
He took another swig of ale as someone came over to join him. Looking up he saw it was one of the squadron leaders from the air wing.
“Join you?”
Gilligan waved him to a seat.
“The wing was out practicing today,” said the man, whose name, Gilligan remembered, was Martinus or something like that.
Gilligan nodded “I was watching from the war room.”
“What did you think?”
“Still needs a little work.”
They say you’ve done operations like this before,” Martinus said.