Previously, in Stormbreak: An avalanche nearby, a collapsed school filled with children, and multiple Search and rescue crews on the ground. Now Peekaboo, in a V-22 Osprey vertical takeoff-and-landing airplane, has arrived in support…

The Osprey barreled in like its namesake, wings wide and nose down. The choppers scattered. The wash from an Osprey's oversized props could mangle the air a helicopter grabbed. The big white bird was a compact hurricane.

Mac watched with admiration as the Osprey swept in to the school, turned a tight circle to point nose out from the building, then rotated its nacelles into a twin-prop hover. In the process it sprayed the entire op with mud, no getting around that. Clouds of the stuff blasted outward from the nacelles or whirled in...

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