Battle Stories #18

Nick Brooks has dreamed his whole life of becoming a paratrooper like his decorated brother Tom, and after enlisting, he's assigned to Tom's old outfit, the Eagle Division. But when a fellow recruit's parachute fails during training—with devastating results—Nick finds himself paralyzed by fear, and must decide whether he has the courage to make his first jump. Tom steps in to share his own harrowing story from the Normandy invasion, reminding his younger brother that even the bravest soldiers have known terror—and that facing it is what makes them soldiers.

Two rival street kids from New York, Joe Sloan and Tommy Baxter, carry their lifelong feud straight into the Korean War—first as Navy pilots competing to outdo each other in combat, then as desperate allies when one of them goes down behind enemy lines. When duty calls Joe to attempt a rescue against orders, the two discover that fighting the real enemy might matter more than settling old scores.

Major Hank Stone is a by-the-book Marine perfectionist who demands flawless discipline from his pilots—until a bombing run over North Korea goes catastrophically wrong, and the iron-willed commander discovers that even his rigid standards can't protect against a devastating miscalculation. As Stone faces the terrible consequences of his mistake, he must reckon with the gap between the unforgiving code he's lived by and the weight of command when things go wrong.

A Navy weather plane vanishes in Arctic waters, shot down by enemy fighters in waters where none should exist—triggering a desperate hunt led by Commander Frank Case. When Case himself encounters the impossible MiGs and barely escapes, a wild hunch strikes him: the Soviets have hollowed out a massive iceberg to create a secret aircraft carrier. Now Case must devise a way to neutralize this frozen fortress before the enemy's mysterious base can strike again.