Jye, Ben, Tony and I had all read the Wingman series by Mack Maloney, a series which Jye had gotten me hooked on in 1990, and I got the other two hooked on in '93. Mack was one of the first real influences on my later style of writing for the Elite Eagles, but, back in 1994, when I started this story, I had only written a few other little stories in the ETF world, a pair called Confrontation and The Concorde Incident. I only wrote about five paragraphs of this "what if" where the ETF meets Wingman, but it was enough that it got interest in that line of thought planted in the crew. Years later, in 1997, from January 23 through February 20th, I wrote another 25 pages during classes at UNO, while ostensibly taking notes in my British Literature Course. (I don't remember all these dates, I actually have a habit of writing the date next to whatever passage I happen to scribble in my notebooks, and the class is on the cover.) Then, I all but forgot about the story. It's Ben's fault that this is actually on the page now, typed. After making it through the 16th Wingman novel, he asked what had ever happened to the story I started where Hawk met the ETF, as he thought it would be interesting to see how such a meeting would turn out.