Weapons Tight: A Novel of the Vietnam Rescue War
Two hours and twenty-six minutes. That is the number Air Force pararescueman Wade Keller cannot stop running through his head, the gap between the order to abort a rescue and the moment intelligence confirmed the downed pilot had still been alive to hear it. He built a rule out of that number. He has never broken it.
When reconnaissance pilot Luke Tanner is shot down deep over the karst mountains of Laos with a film canister zipped into his flight suit, the machine built to bring him home begins to move: Skyraider pilots, helicopter crews, a colonel counting the cost in fuel and aircraft, and an intelligence analyst who has found a pattern no one wants to hear about.
On the other side of the valley, a North Vietnamese Army captain has been waiting seven months for exactly this. He has studied every American rescue for three years, and he has learned the one thing that matters more than the pilot's life: the Americans will send everything they have to save him. All he has to do is let them.
What follows is a single, brutal stretch of low passes and silent guns, of doctrine tested against terrain, and of two men, one hunting and one hunted, who understand the trap they are standing in better than anyone flying above it.
WEAPONS TIGHT is a novel about the promise the United States military makes to every person who climbs into a cockpit, and the men on both sides who have to live inside the cost of keeping it.
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