Chapter 6 Attrition #3
Training. The training took over. My hands knew the rifle. My body knew the position. The flashbang had scrambled my senses but it hadn't touched the muscle memory that two decades of combat had burned into my nervous system.
The front door came off its hinges.
Boot, shoulder, the frame splintering inward.
First hostile through—fast, helmeted, weapon sweeping left.
I fired twice from the hallway junction.
Center mass. The suppressed rifle punched two rounds into his vest at fifteen feet—he staggered, stumbled, body armor absorbing the impact but not the force—and I adjusted.
Head. The third round caught the helmet at the temple and punched through fiberglass and bone.
He dropped like his strings had been cut.
The second hostile came through over his partner's body.
My vision was still swimming—I saw two of him, three, the afterimage splitting and recombining—and my first shot went wide, catching his shoulder, spinning him into the wall.
He screamed, high and sharp, the sound cutting through the ringing in my ears.
The flashbang still had me. I blinked hard, forced my vision to resolve, found the shape of his helmet against the wall, and fired.
The round ripped through the faceplate. The screaming stopped.
Outside, the gunfire hadn't stopped—the ridgeline exchange was a constant roar now, punctuated by the heavier crack of Tank's rifle and the sharp report of return fire pinging off the rock formations.
Inside, the cabin shook with every near-miss that hit the exterior walls.
Plaster dust rained from the ceiling. The world was noise and concussion and the copper smell of blood.
From the kitchen—separated from me by a wall I couldn't see through—the sound of the gas burner igniting. Sean's countermeasure. Blue flame washing out the NVGs. Then the crack of impact. Sean's fist meeting body armor, followed by the crash of a man hitting the overturned table.
I couldn't see the kitchen from the hallway.
Could hear Sean fighting but not reach him without abandoning the corridor.
I held position. Trusted him. My ears were ringing, my vision pulsing with residual flash, and every second I spent upright and aiming was a second that training provided and my senses did not.
A third hostile pushed through the front door.
Low, staying under my previous firing angle, using the bodies as cover.
Smart. I fired and the round sparked off his helmet—a glancing blow that snapped his head sideways but didn't penetrate.
He returned fire. Two rounds into the drywall six inches from my head, plaster erupting in a cloud that stung my eyes. I dropped to a knee and waited.
He advanced. I let him take two steps into the narrow hallway—past the bodies, into the funnel—then I rose and fired point-blank. The round entered under the chin, below the helmet's edge, and exited through the top of the skull. He collapsed on top of the others.
Three dead in a space twelve feet long and four feet wide. The hallway was a charnel house. Cordite and plaster dust and blood.
From the kitchen, Sean's voice—raw, electric: "COME ON!"
A crash. A struggle. Then a single gunshot—sharp, deafening, the unsuppressed report of a weapon fired at contact distance.
"Sean—status!"
"Kitchen clear!" His breathing was ragged, adrenaline-scorched. "Two down. I'm good. Dec—I'm good."
Relief hit like a wave. I shoved it down—but not before the thought broke through: his leg held. It must have. He was alive and standing and his voice was strong, and that meant the leg that had kept him out of every fight for four months had finally done what he'd needed it to do.
A sound behind me. The side entrance—the one I'd barricaded with a bookshelf that morning. The barricade must have been breached while I was focused on the hallway, the noise lost under the constant gunfire that still hammered from the ridgelines. A hostile was already through. Close. Too close.
His forearm slammed across my throat and drove me backward into the wall, pinning me. His other hand found my right arm—my pistol arm—and crushed it against the drywall, trapping the Sig against the timber framing.
No air. His forearm compressed my trachea.
My vision narrowed to a tunnel with his helmeted face at the center—visor down, anonymous, professional.
Outside, the firefight raged on, muffled through the walls—the crack of rifles, the ping of rounds hitting metal, a shout from the ridge that might have been Ghost's voice.
Inside, there was only this: a man bigger than me with leverage and position, and my compressed airway giving me about six seconds before the tunnel closed.
I pushed. Every ounce of force into my trapped right arm, the muscles of my shoulder and chest straining against his grip. The Sig moved—an inch, two inches—not enough to aim at his body but enough to angle the muzzle downward. I fired.
The round hit his foot. The boot blew apart. He screamed, a raw animal sound that vibrated through his forearm into my throat, and his grip weakened for a fraction of a second.
A fraction was enough. I ripped my pistol arm free, caught his choking forearm with my left hand, and wrenched it sideways in a joint lock that hyperextended his elbow.
He bent forward, arm straight, the lock forcing him down.
I put the Sig's muzzle against the base of his skull—the gap between helmet and collar, three inches of exposed neck—and fired.
All strength left him at once. He dropped straight down, hitting the floor with a heavy, final thud.
I stood in the hallway, breathing hard, my throat burning, my right hand shaking.
The ringing in my ears had changed frequency—lower now, pulsing, the flashbang's effects still dragging at my senses.
The outside firefight was thinning—fewer shots, longer intervals between exchanges. The ridgeline team was winning.
From the back of the cabin. Glass. The bedroom window.
Everything in my chest went white.
Not adrenaline. I knew adrenaline. This was the frequency I'd felt twice in the last five minutes—once when I'd heard Sean fighting for his life through a wall I couldn't see through, and now again, at the sound of shattering glass from the room where Nolan was alone.
The same terror. The same desperate, non-negotiable urgency that had, until recently, belonged to one person only.
I was already running. Down the hallway, over the bodies, through the doorframe—the Sig up, my vision locked on the broken window and the dark shape climbing through it.
A percussive crack. Heavy. Final. Metal meeting skull through fiberglass.
Nolan was standing over the collapsed hostile, fire extinguisher raised in a two-handed overhead grip, arms locked, his entire body vibrating.
His glasses sat crooked on his face. The hostile was out cold on the floor, helmet cracked at the temple.
The hip rotation I'd drilled him on. Full weight transfer. Textbook.
He looked at me. Wide eyes. Steady. Furious.
"You're okay," I said. Quiet.
"I'm okay." His voice shook. His hands didn't.
I wanted to cross the room. Wanted to put my hands on his shoulders. Wanted to do things that had no place in a firefight and no explanation that fit inside the word asset.
I turned back to the hallway.
A round caught my left side, low—a streak of white-hot pain that spun me into the doorframe. Graze. I knew it instantly. The bullet had skimmed across the external oblique, opening skin without penetrating the muscle wall. A line of fire from hip to navel.
The hostile who'd fired was already dead—Sean had come out of the kitchen and put two rounds in his chest before the man could fire again.
"Dec!" Sean's face. Close. His hand on my arm. "You're hit."
"Graze. I'm fine."
"You're bleeding."
"I'm fine."
Outside, the firefight was ending. The ridgeline team had torn through the hostiles pinned at the vehicles. Axel's voice came through the radio, steady and commanding: "Northeast clear. All hostiles down."
Tyler: "East clear. Ghost is running final sweep."
The desert fell quiet in stages—the last echoes of gunfire rolling across the basin, then silence, then the sound of boots on gravel as the backup team moved down from the ridges.
Tank appeared at the front door. He filled the doorway the way he filled every doorway—completely, immovably. His eyes found the bodies in the hallway and showed nothing. Then they found the blood on my side.
"Minor," I said.
His expression suggested he'd be verifying that.
Kai was inside within two minutes, headlamp on, medical bag open, moving with the controlled urgency of a man whose ER training made a desert firefight feel like a Tuesday night shift.
He went to Blade first—a graze across the forearm from a ricochet, a wound that would have kept a recovering man down if the recovering man had any intention of staying down.
Blade didn't. Kai cleaned it, dressed it, and said nothing about the two chest scars visible through the torn shirt, because saying something would have been pointless and they both knew it.
Ghost had taken a round to the vest—no penetration, but the bruising would be ugly.
Kai checked his breathing, confirmed no fractures, taped him.
Tyler hovered. Not interfering—Tyler never interfered with Kai's work—but present, close, his body angled between Kai and the door.
Sean sat me on the overturned couch and peeled my shirt away from the wound.
The graze was eight inches long, shallow, bleeding freely.
He irrigated it with bottled water, applied pressure with gauze, and taped the dressing with a focus that had nothing to do with the medical task and everything to do with the fact that his jaw was clenched so tight the muscles jumped under the skin.
"It's shallow," he said. His voice was level. His jaw was not. "Kai will want to check it, but it's shallow."
"I know."
"You got shot, Dec."
"Grazed."
"You got grazed by a bullet, which is a distinction that only matters to the person who didn't watch it happen.
" He smoothed the final strip of tape and his hand stayed on my side—palm flat over the dressing, warm through the gauze.
His eyes met mine. Green and bright and carrying a frequency I recognized because I'd been carrying it myself since I'd heard him fighting through a wall and a window breaking behind me in the same terrible minute.
The fear of losing the person you can't lose.
I put my hand over his. Held it. Two seconds. His forehead dropped against my shoulder, and for a moment the man who never stopped talking said nothing at all.
Nolan appeared with water and a clean shirt. He moved with the careful deliberation of a man managing his own adrenaline comedown—each step precise, hands occupied because empty hands would shake. He set the water on the floor beside us. Held out the shirt.
His hand landed on my shoulder. Light. Brief. The touch of someone who didn't know where the boundaries were but needed contact badly enough to risk crossing them.
My breath caught.
Small. Involuntary. A reaction that bypassed the mind entirely.
Sean lifted his head. He'd felt the catch.
His eyes moved from Nolan's hand to my face to Nolan's face, reading the three-point geometry of a moment that had just shifted.
His expression didn't close. Didn't harden.
It softened—quick, unguarded, gone in a blink.
But I'd seen it. And what I'd seen was not jealousy.
Axel's voice cut through from the front door. "Dec. We need to move. If any of them transmitted before we dropped comms, Holt's people know the strike team was hit. Second wave could be inside the hour."
He was right. The hostiles carried encrypted radios. No way to know if one had gotten a call out during the initial ambush.
I got to my feet. The graze pulled. I ignored it.
"Kai—everyone mobile?"
"Ghost and Blade are good to move. Dec, I want to look at that graze properly when we stop."
"You'll get your chance. Everyone—vehicles in five. Evidence, weapons, medical supplies. Leave everything else."
The cabin emptied in minutes. Nolan already had the evidence backpack strapped tight—he'd been wearing it since before the first shot.
Sean limped slightly on the bad leg but his hands were steady on the rifle he carried, and his eyes were hard, and when he passed me in the hallway he squeezed my arm once—brief, fierce, saying everything his mouth wouldn't.
Outside, the desert was silent. The hostiles' vehicles sat dark and empty at the base of the ridge, glass shattered, tires shot out.
Bodies lay in the scrubland where the crossfire had caught them.
No survivors. Sixteen men had come to kill Nolan Mercer, and sixteen men had failed.
Holt would feel the loss—not just the manpower, but the message.
His hired army had met resistance it wasn't built for, and the men who'd delivered it were already gone.
Tank and Blade brought the trucks around from behind the rock formations where they'd been hidden since noon. Two vehicles, engines running, headlights off.
I climbed into the driver's seat of the lead truck. Sean beside me, his head tipped back, eyes closed but not sleeping. Nolan in the back seat, the evidence backpack between his knees, his hands finally still.
Axel's truck fell in behind us. Tank, Tyler, Kai, Blade, Ghost—six men from a brotherhood of thirty, the ones Hawk could spare while the rest held the clubhouse and ran operations that didn't stop because one safehouse had gone loud.
I pulled onto the highway. The desert stretched flat in every direction, the headlights carving a tunnel through the dark. In the rearview mirror, Nolan's eyes were already there. Watching me through the glass. Steady. Calm. Present.
He didn't look away when I caught him. Neither did I.
Sean's hand found the center console, palm up. I put my hand over it without looking. His fingers closed around mine.
The graze throbbed under its dressing. The adrenaline was fading, and what it left behind was the thought I'd been carrying since I'd run down that hallway toward the sound of breaking glass.
The fear I'd felt for Nolan was the same fear. The same frequency. The same location in my chest.
If Sean was feeling what I was feeling, we needed to talk about it.
If he wasn't, the conversation would break something I couldn't repair.
But that was a problem for daylight. Right now there was a highway and a hand in mine and a pair of eyes in the mirror, and the distance between one safehouse and the next was measured not in miles but in the things we hadn't said.
The sun came up behind us. The cabin was gone.