"Good kill, Warshark One!"

Major Jax Valkyr grinned, slammed the throttle and banked hard. The turbofan engines of her A10 Thunderbolt II roared into a banshee-shrill as she soared upwards and away from the wreckage of the MBT that her GAU-8 Avenger Gatling Cannon had ripped into and shredded into flaming wreckage. The laser-guided munitions that she'd carried and expended had already savaged several more, along with a forward command bunker, and she was eager to add a few more kills to her tally this day. The advance of the Eastern Bloc forces had been, for now at least, stalled by the arrival of what more than one ground-pounder had come to term as the 'Thunderbolt Angels'.

"Warshark Squadron: spread out and come around for another pass."

"Warshark Two acknowledges."

"Warshark Three acknowledges."

One by one, her fellow pilots reported in. Senior pilots all, the 'Angels' had flown dozens of missions in the past few weeks in an efforts to stem the advancing tide of armour. The venerable 'Warthog' had proven invaluable in its ability to take off from even the most makeshift of FOBs, and its reputation for armoured ruggedness had yet again proven not to be exaggerated. The last few weeks had certainly put it to the test. Jax's battle-scarred 'hog had taken more than a few hits from radar-controlled AA fire and she'd been grateful for just how thick the armour-plating was.

Her hog now bucked like a stubborn mustang as anti-aircraft fire from self-propelled vehicles rose up from the smoking battlefield. Jax banked hard again and shook her wings in an effort to present more of a difficult target to lock on to. Whereas other ground-attack or multirole aircraft had speed to rely on, that was perhaps the one area where the Warthog fell short and relied upon its resilient armoured frame to offset. But that was also one of the things that made it a first-rate close air support plane.

"Break right, Warshark One! Break right!"

"Fuck!"

Someone or something had locked onto her. With no Missile Approach Warning system of her own, she and the rest of the squadron had to rely on their fighter escort for protection from airborne threats. Obviously something had slipped through. Jax hesitated for the briefest of moments in her visual sweep-scan of the sky through her canopy before engaging her ECM pod and gritted her teeth as she fought to jink and maneuver through and weather the hailstorm of AA fire from the 'Shilkas' that were targeting her. She felt as if she could feel a missile bearing down on her and burning a hole into the back of her head with the intensity of its angry and death-dealing metaphorical glare as it homed in on her.

Jax hoped that she was wrong.

----

This was one of the first aviation pieces I commissioned from the very talented tales_foxdale, and features my co-sharksona, Jax Valkyr, as the pilot of one of my absolute favourite military aircraft, the A-10 Thunderbolt II. It's such a badass death-dealing machine that refuses to die, no matter how many times an attempt to mothball it has been made, that I couldn't resist making my first (but by far not the last!) commission from Tales a Warthog themed one. Jax seemed to be the perfect person for a Warthog too. For those unfamilar with this armoured beast of the sky, check out this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBEU_Op60fU. Give Tales a watch too. As a fellow aviation nut, I can tell he's got a lot of passion for these kinds of pieces and is a pretty awesome artist in general!

Written Fiction & Jax Valkyr © Myself

Artwork ©