Circle Fire (Night Gunships Book 1)

The medevac burns on the pad, the camp is surrounded, and Major Merrill Strock tells the radio, “We'll be here.”

Strock flies a new AC-119K Stinger gunship out of Phan Rang with the 18th Special Operations Squadron, in the last weeks of the old AC-47 Spooky. His crew of ten finds targets by heat, starlight and radar, and his navigator, Captain Abe Kornfeld, builds the picture out loud from a stream bend and a camp flare. Their job is Camp Bu Krak, a camp of local strikers and their families on a ridge by the Cambodian border, under siege by a North Vietnamese regiment.

Major Cù Công Mẫn, a former mathematics teacher, commands the heavy weapons around the camp. He teaches his gunners with a string and a stick in the dirt, and he learns the gunship fast: grass fires to blind its sensors, machine guns outside its circle, attacks timed for the hours it has to go home. Strock promised all night, every night, and he doesn't yet know how.