To the aircraft my people flew.

I sat in a bare briefing room in Spain and listened to a federal investigator explain, in careful, sorry language, that the mid-air control failure that had killed my wingman eighteen months earlier — the failure I had spent every day since carrying like a stone sewn into my chest — had not been fate, and had not been my error.

It had been a defective part.

A counterfeit component sold into a military supply chain by the same man who had just tried to drown an airliner full of strangers to hide a different set of books.