5. Gabriel
GAbrIEL
Tonight, the board has something to say back.
My flashlight beam crawls down the laminated order of march. Okafor on point. Delgado, Spencer. Hayes, Petrillo. And there, in grease pencil, a name crossed out at the bottom and rewritten in second position.
NR. Initialed. Right under my own.
I stand in the rain for a long moment and let the anger come. A specialist with four minutes in theater edited a patrol order signed by a full colonel. In some units that’s an Article 15. In others, it’s a career headstone.
Then the anger burns down, and what’s underneath is worse.
He’s right.
Trail position is where I put men I don’t trust, and Reyes shoots better than anyone on this base, including me, and the Dravosians stack their ambushes against the front third of a column, because that’s where the leadership walks.
Any objective commander puts Reyes exactly where Reyes put himself.
I didn’t. I stuck him in the back and told myself it was about trust.
Reyes saw right through it. Twenty-three years old, barely a day on my base, and he read me like a range card, then wrote his answer on my board and initialed it so I’d know exactly whose hand held the pencil. As if there’d be any doubt.
I wipe his edit off the laminate with my thumb.
Then I rewrite the order of march.
He reports to the ops hut at 0450. I sent Okafor to wake him at 0445, and while that’s not exactly tactically wise, there’s a specific kind of pleasure in stealing forty minutes of his sleep.
Reyes comes through the door in full kit, face still creased from the pillow, and stands at something close enough to attention that I can’t ding him for it.
I let him look at me across the map table.
“You want to tell me about the board, Specialist?”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “I made a written suggestion, sir.”
I take a slow breath. “You altered a signed patrol order.”
“I altered a laminated one. Grease pencil wipes off.” His eyes flick to my thumb, to the gray smear I didn’t fully scrub away, and one corner of his mouth twitches in a way that’s just criminal. “Sir.”
I come around the table, moving slowly. Reyes holds his ground like he held it at the range—chin level, weight even. This close, I can see his pulse beating in his throat, quick and steady.
“Here’s what you don’t understand,” I say, keeping my voice low. “It was a good correction. Tactically sound. If Okafor had brought it to me over the map, I’d have made the change and thanked him.”
Reyes blinks, visibly thrown. He didn’t expect me to give him the point.
“But you didn’t bring it to me,” I continue. “You wrote it on my board in the dark. You wanted me to find it. You wanted a reaction.” I stop close enough that he has to tip his chin up to hold my gaze. “How’s this one?”
His breath goes shallow. I hear it change. Neither of us moves.
“You’re at rear security,” I tell him.
His jaw tightens. “Sir, the ambush pattern—”
“I know the ambush pattern. I wrote the brief.” I step back, grab my gloves off the table, and pull them on to give my hands a mission. “The order of march did change tonight, Reyes. Just not because of your correction. I’m walking this one. Second position. If the ambush comes, it comes to me.”
Reyes narrows his eyes. A muscle ticks in his cheek as he clenches his jaw.
“You put your best rifle where the fight starts,” he says finally. “Your words. Basically. Sir.”
“My best rifle showed me last night what he does with orders he doesn’t agree with.
” I hold his gaze, unblinking. “You’ll cover our six until I know that when I put you somewhere, you stay there.
On patrol, in a firefight, anywhere. If I can’t predict where a weapon will point, it’s no use to me.
It’s just a hazard I’m carrying around.”
“And if I stay where you put me?”
I let a second pass before answering. “Then we’ll talk about where you belong.”
I can practically see the gears turning behind his eyes, responses being drafted and discarded.
“Yes, sir,” he finally says. No hook in it this time.
I nod. “Step-off in thirty. Dismissed.”
He goes. The door swings shut behind him, and I stand there in the lantern light and tell myself I added my own name to that patrol for tactical reasons.
Yeah. I don’t buy it either.
We step off at 0530 into fog thick enough to choke on.
The Velin approach is an old goat track widened by decades of smugglers and soldiers who all wanted the same thing—to move through these mountains without dying.
Okafor takes point, I walk second, and behind me the file stretches back into the fog.
Delgado under the heavy kit, Spencer with the gun, Petrillo, Hayes and his radio.
And seventy meters back, at the end of the line, Reyes.
I don’t turn around to look at him. Okafor checks the file every time we halt, and every time, the report comes up the line with the same two words: rear secure. I keep my eyes on the slope ahead and pretend I can’t feel him at my back.
The first time we stop to rest, Hayes drops to a knee beside Delgado and talks to him in a whisper that carries anyway, because it’s too goddamn quiet out here.
“Question. If I die of this rucksack before the enemy gets a shot in, does it count as combat?”
“No,” Delgado answers dryly.
“What does it count as?”
“Natural causes.”
“That’s cold, man. That’s going in the letter to my mother. Your son died of nature.”
“Quiet,” Okafor hisses from up the slope, and Hayes shuts up.
Spencer scans left with the gun. Petrillo passes a water check down the file. Routine. Good routine. I run my eyes over each of them and find nothing to correct, which is the highest compliment I can give.
The track bends north below a ridge line the map calls Hill 604. This is where the Dravosian patrol pattern broke. Until ten days ago, they walked this ridge twice a week, regular as a train schedule. Then twice in three days. Then nothing at all for five.
Okafor halts us at the bend. Danger area. Open rock face, seventy meters of exposure before the pines pick back up. If I were a Dravosian commander with any ambition, my kill zone would be right here.
The radio clicks twice. Then Hayes’s voice, barely above a breath.
“Rear says hold. Reyes’s got something.”
Every man in the file goes to ground. I move back down the slope, keeping low, past Spencer and the gun, past Petrillo pressed into the rocks, and find Reyes prone behind a deadfall with his rifle up and his cheek off the stock, checking the back trail with just his eyes.
I go down beside him until we’re shoulder to shoulder, both of us flat in the wet needles. This close, I can feel the heat coming off him, smell the soap he used in the shower last night, and, fuck, none of that is tactical information.
“Report.”
“Glint,” he breathes. “Back trail, high right, maybe four hundred meters. Ridge past the second bend. Twice, same spot, ten seconds apart.” His eyes never stop moving. “Sun’s behind us now. Somebody’s glass caught it.”
“Or a shell casing,” I murmur. “Wet rock.”
Reyes tilts his head. “Wet rock doesn’t blink, sir.”
I bring my own optic up and walk it along the ridge he pointed out. Rock, scrub pine, shadow. Nothing. Thirty seconds crawl past with the two of us breathing in sync, my eyes on a shadow.
Then it moves. A shape detaches itself from the rock and slips into the trees with the ease of a man who has done this many times before.
“One,” I murmur. “Moving off. No shot, no need.” I key my radio. “All elements, hold. Single observer on our back trail, breaking contact. Nobody engages.” I lower the radio. “He wasn’t here to fight us. He was here to count us.”
Reyes turns his head. This close, his eyes are more amber than brown, and I put my attention back on the ridge where it belongs.
“Count us for who, sir?” he asks under his breath.
“For whoever paid for it. Somebody wanted a headcount of our patrol, and they just got one.” I lower the optic. “They knew our route window, too. He was in position before we ever stepped off.”
“Sir.” Reyes’s voice stays low, all the swagger gone. This is the real soldier now. “If he was set before dawn, he had a hide.”
I dip my head. “He did.”
“If it’s there, we can find it.”
I look at him. He looks at the ridge.
“Okafor holds the file,” I say. “You and I walk the ridge.”
We find it twenty minutes later, tucked into a rock cleft below the crest with an overhead of cut pine boughs.
Reyes covers while I go through it. There’s a flattened square where a mat used to be, two cigarette butts pressed into a crack in the rock—dark tobacco, Dravosian—and a tin that held food.
And wedged under a stone, forgotten or abandoned in a hurry, a range card.
I unfold it flat on the rock. Hand-drawn. Precise. The Velin approach—our approach—sketched in pencil with distances marked to every choke point. Three columns of times in the margin, patrol windows logged over days. Ours, and the two units that walked this route before us.
At the bottom corner, a wolf’s head, drawn in three quick strokes.
“Border Wolves,” Reyes says over my shoulder. He’s supposed to be covering us, but his eyes are on the card. “That’s their mark, right? The unit the interpreters won’t talk about?”
“Eyes on our rear, Specialist,” I say, and he swings back out while I photograph the card, the hide, the butts.
“They’ve been pattern-mapping Kestrel’s patrols for at least two weeks,” I say, folding the card into a bag. “Every route. Every window. This isn’t reconnaissance for an ambush on one patrol.”
“It’s targeting for the base,” Reyes suggests grimly.
“Or for something moving through Velin Pass that they don’t want us seeing when it moves.” I stand. “Either way, command’s assessment was wrong. The patrols didn’t shift because of internal Dravosian politics. They shifted to pull our attention while these people did their homework.”
Reyes scans the tree line, rifle steady. “For the record, sir. The glint. I caught it from rear security.”
I resist the urge to sigh. “I know where you were, Specialist.”
“Just saying. Best seat in the house, turns out.” He gives it a second. “Whoever assigned it must be some kind of tactical genius.”
I should reprimand him for talking to a superior officer like that. Instead, my shoulders come down an inch, and I have to fight hard not to smile.
“Move out,” I order. “We’re walking the file home a different way than we came.”
“Yes, sir.”
Shit. The hook’s back in the words, and I feel like I’m signing my own infraction report.
We rejoin the file, where Okafor takes one look at my face and starts planning the return route before I say a word. Hayes gets the report off to Kestrel in clipped bursts. Delgado shifts the heavy kit and squints at the ridge like he’s holding a personal grudge against it.
“So the good news,” Hayes whispers as we form up, “is nobody shot us.”
“The bad news,” Delgado says back, “is they’re saving us for later.”
Hayes clicks his tongue. “See, this is why nobody sits with you at chow.”
We move out through the thinning fog, me in second position, and seventy meters behind me, Reyes covers our six. Every time Okafor checks the file, the report comes up the line the same way.
Rear secure.
And for the first time since I opened his file, I believe it.
Which should make me breathe easier. Instead, it does the exact opposite.