If your numbers were right, the manufacturer would have grounded it. This bird is cleared. Go get some sleep. You look terrible.'" "He's not wrong about that last part," Marcus said. "You do look terrible. " "Marcus, I'm serious.
He's going to fly it. He's going to take it to 104% RPM in front of the entire United States government, and he's going to" Daniel couldn't say it. "What do we do? " And Marcus Bennett stood very still, and he thought about a folded flag in a box under his bed, and he thought about the last time he'd stood by while a good man climbed into an aircraft that shouldn't have flown, and he made a decision that he would either regret or be defined by for the rest of his life. We go to her one more time, Marcus said, both of us. And this time she's going to listen because this time I'm not going to be the janitor.
This time I'm going to be the only man in this building who's actually flown one of these things at that RPM and lived. Daniel's mouth fell open. You What did you just say? You heard me. You've flown a helicopter at 104% rotor RPM under combat load.
You've done that. Marcus looked at him, and for the first time in 3 years he stopped pretending. Son, he said quietly, I've done things at the edge of what those rotors can survive that would turn your hair white. I've flown aircraft that don't have names in the daylight. I've held collective in one hand while the whole airframe was screaming at me exactly the way that one out there is going to scream tomorrow, and I brought it home.
And then I brought it home again. And then one day I brought it home for the last time, and they took my name off every record they had, and I've spent 9 years mopping floors and raising my daughter, and telling myself that part of my life was over. He paused. But it's not over. Not if it means watching that man die tomorrow when I could have stopped it.
So, no, I'm not the janitor, not today. Daniel Okafor stood in the middle of the world's largest private aerospace hangar and felt the ground move under his feet, and he understood finally all the way down exactly who he'd been talking to for the last 3 weeks. Okay. Daniel breathed. Okay, let's go.
They didn't get the chance that morning because at that exact moment across the hangar, Evelyn Carter's world began to come apart in a way that had nothing to do with the janitor at all. It started with the government liaison, a silver-haired man named Harmon, who had been circling the SR-9 for two days with the expression of a man reading a contract he was starting to regret. Marcus watched from across the floor as Harmon pulled Evelyn aside near the aircraft. And though he couldn't hear the words, he could read the body language, and the body language was catastrophe. Evelyn's shoulders had gone rigid.
Her hand had come up to her mouth. Harmon was talking and pointing at a tablet and shaking his head, and whatever he was saying was landing on Evelyn Carter like a series of blows. Daniel drifted closer under the pretext of checking a panel, and he heard enough. He came back to Marcus, pale as paper. "There was a whistleblower report," Daniel said.