The link died the first time at twenty past two.
Static filled the speaker, then nothing, and the young airman beside me, Torres, looked up from his logbook like the silence was his fault.
"Ma'am, I lost them," he said.
"You did not lose them," I said. "The relay did. Try again, slower."
He keyed the mic. "Any station this net, this is Ops, radio check, over."
Nothing came back except a thin hiss.
On the board, three call signs waited in grease pencil. They were out there in the dark beyond Sangin, and we were the thread tying them to each other. I did not command any of them. My job was smaller and, that night, heavier. I kept the thread from breaking.
"Switch to the backup frequency," I said.
Torres switched. He called again. A voice broke through halfway, torn up by static.
"Ops, this is... say again... we are..."
Then it was gone.
Captain Ellis leaned in from the next desk, our senior that night.
"Romano, if the relay is cooked, it is cooked," he said. "Log it and wait for the techs."
"Tech team said an hour," I said. "Maybe more."
"Those units do not have an hour of quiet in them, sir. They are scared and spread out."
He studied me, then the board. "What do you want to do?"
"Reroute by hand. Use the vehicle relay at the gate, then hop through the second net. It will be ugly. It might hold."
"It might not."
"It might," I said. "Let me try."
He nodded once. "Your net, Captain. Keep me posted."
Torres pulled the frequency card from the binder, hands shaking.
"Breathe," I said quietly. "Talk me through it."
"Backup relay first," he said. "Then I reprogram the set, then I call in sequence, one, two, three."
"Good. Go."
For twenty minutes the room was small sounds. Switches clicking. Torres calling, waiting, calling again. Me on the landline, telling a sergeant at the gate to keep his vehicle running and his antenna up, please, just a while longer.
"You want me to sit here and be a tower?" the sergeant asked.
"I want you to be the best tower in Helmand," I said.
He laughed, surprised. "Copy that, ma'am. Tower duty. I can do that."
The first unit came back faint and far away.
"Ops, this is One, we read you broken but readable, over."
Torres grinned. "I read you the same, One. Stand by for Two and Three, over."
Two answered on the second try. Three did not. Three worried me, a small team with a weak radio and a young sounding leader.
"Keep calling Three," I said. "Every two minutes. Same calm voice. He will hear the pattern even if he cannot answer every time."
"What do I say if he answers scared, ma'am?"
"You tell him what is true. That we are here. That we are not going anywhere. That the next check is in five minutes."
The link failed again at three, just as Three finally answered.
"Ops, Three, we thought you were gone, over."
My throat closed. I keyed the mic myself.
"Three, this is Ops. We are still here. We had a failure on our end, not yours. You did nothing wrong. Say your status when you are ready, over."
A pause crackled. "Ops, Three, status is holding. We are holding. It helps hearing you, over."
"It helps hearing you too, Three," I said. "Next check in five. We will be here."
Ellis stood behind us while Torres worked the reroute a third time, after the gate relay overheated and dropped.
"Again?" Torres said. "Ma'am, it dropped again."
"Then again," I said. "Swap to the spare set. I will make the calls while you swap."
"You are not going to let this net go, are you?" Ellis said.
"No, sir," I said. "Not while they are still out there."
He almost smiled. "You stick to a problem like glue, Romano. Like absolute glue."
On the speaker, One came back laughing through static. "Ops, say again who sticks like glue? Because from out here, that sounds about right, over."
Torres wrote it in the log before I could stop him. Under call sign, where I had always just been Six, he wrote a new word in block letters.
Sticky Six.
By dawn the techs had replaced the relay and the net sounded clean and ordinary again. Three checked in one last time, steady now.
"Sticky Six, this is Three. Thanks for staying on. Out."
People asked me about it later, and I never made a speech of it. I got the name because I do not let go easily. That is all. It was true on that net, and it has stayed true, for better and for worse.
Chapter 7: March 2013