GABRIEL
The voice on the other end of the crackling satellite phone belongs to a lieutenant colonel named Brandt who has never set foot east of a desk.
“Your report on the range card got attention, Wolfe. That’s why they want a full bird sitting on that wire,” he says without inflection.
I shake my head even though he can’t see me. “Then send me a drone rotation and better signals coverage.”
“I’m sending you people.”
I look at Okafor across the map table. He narrows his eyes.
Kestrel runs the kind of operations that keep the access roster short—it’s why I haven’t had an XO in months.
Every officer they clear for this base is one more name that can end up in front of a committee.
If command is suddenly willing to add more bodies, something upstairs has changed.
“How many people?” I ask.
“Eight. Two elements. Convoy arrives tomorrow, 1400 window.” Paper shuffles on his end. “Files are already in your inbox. Command wants Kestrel reinforced before the Wolves finish whatever they’re building toward. And before you ask, I’m instructed to tell you that no, you don’t get a vote.”
“Wasn’t going to ask,” I mutter.
“This is why they like you.” The line hisses. “Read the files, Colonel. The four-man team comes as a package. Don’t split them up.”
The call drops before I can ask why.
Okafor pulls the printouts off the field printer, squares the pages with two taps against the table, and deals them out like a hand of cards. We read.
First file. Staff Sergeant Ryan Callahan, thirty-one, three combat tours, a hostage recovery citation with half the paragraph blacked out. His last commander’s evaluation reads Does not quit, does not know how, which I recognize as praise and warning in the same breath.
“He’ll lead the second element,” I say.
“Steady hands,” Okafor agrees, sliding the next file over. “This one goes with him.”
Sergeant Finn Wilder. I read the marksmanship section twice, just like I once read a specialist’s file twice, and for a similar reason.
Confirmed shots out past distances that make my range at Kestrel look like a carnival booth.
His psych evaluation uses the word contained three times, which tells me the evaluator ran out of nicer ways to say something.
“A sniper like that, sitting on our ridge line,” Okafor says. “Changes the math on Hill 604.”
“It changes the math on everything.” I set Wilder’s file down. “If the Wolves are glassing us, I want somebody glassing back.”
Wilder’s file is followed by two more: Specialist Kevin Liu, medic, and Corporal Terry Sykes, breacher.
Then the next four files come as a built unit, which I’ve never seen before.
A cover memo explains: Staff Sergeant Cole Maddox’s team operates as a single unit and is to be deployed as one.
Somebody with stars on their shoulder signed off on that arrangement, which means somebody with stars owed this team a favor.
Maddox himself is thirty-six, and according to his personnel photo, has the kind of face that’s been telling younger soldiers no for a decade.
Then Specialist Rhett Bishop, combat medic, a stack of commendations for casualties stabilized under fire.
Corporal Jace Walker, breacher, whose disciplinary section is longer than his citation section and whose citation section is impressive. And Sergeant Harper Quinn.
Okafor reads her file longer than the others.
I raise my eyebrows. “Problem, Sergeant?”
“No, sir. Opposite.” He turns a page. “She’s carried this team’s navigation and half its planning for two rotations. Somebody kept writing her evaluations like she was support staff.” He sets it down. “Somebody was wrong.”
“Then we won’t be.” I stack the eight files and knock them square again.
“Callahan, Liu, Sykes and Wilder take the empty huts by the ops line. Maddox’s team gets the two next to supply.
Which leaves us the problem of four huts that have been housing spiders and a mouse dynasty since before I got here. ”
Okafor’s mouth does something that on any other man would be a smile.
“I know exactly who’s available, sir.”
“Get them.”
They file into the command hut ten minutes later. I can tell that Hayes has already constructed theories about why they’ve been summoned, because he walks in mid-sentence.
“All I’m saying is, if it’s a medal ceremony, I want it noted I’ve been carrying this unit emotionally—”
“Quiet,” Okafor says, and Hayes shuts up.
They line up along the wall. Delgado. Spencer. Petrillo. Hayes. And Reyes at the end, hair pushed back off his forehead, collar half a degree off regulation, standing in a way that’s, as always, technically correct and somehow still insolent.
I keep my eyes on the middle of the line.
“Tomorrow at 1400, Kestrel receives eight additional personnel,” I say. “Two elements. A second patrol unit under a Staff Sergeant Callahan, including a designated marksman. And a four-man team under a Staff Sergeant Maddox. Command’s response to the range card.”
“Backup,” Hayes says, brightening. “Actual backup. Sir, I want to go on record that I’m choosing to find this reassuring instead of terrifying.”
“Noted. Your task.” I tap the map where the four empty huts sit in a row. “These have been vacant since spring. They need to be habitable by tomorrow noon. Cleaned, swept, bunks assembled, stove pipes cleared, wiring checked. All four.”
Silence.
“The mouse huts,” Hayes finally says instead of ‘yes, sir’.
“The vacant huts,” I correct.
“Sir, with respect, one of those huts has an ecosystem. Delgado saw a mouse in there that looked at him like he was trespassing.”
“It was fine,” Delgado says.
“It was the size of a boot.”
“A chewed-up boot.”
Petrillo raises a hand halfway. “The stove pipes I can do, sir. I re-lined the ones in the med hut.” Diplomatic as always—volunteering for the worst job before anyone can be assigned it.
“Good. Spencer takes the wiring.” Spencer nods once, which I’ve come to learn is Spencer’s version of a speech. “Hayes, Delgado, bunks and floors. Reyes…”
I make the mistake of looking at him when I say his name.
He’s already looking at me. He’s not grinning. Not smirking. Steady, patient brown eyes hold mine across the map table like he’s got all day and knows I don’t. Like he knows I want to look away.
It’s been six days since the run, since I doubled back along the supply huts to find my missing soldier and stopped dead at the mouth of a gap between buildings, because the sound coming out of that gap was unmistakably the sound of a man getting off.
And by the time Noah Reyes came around the corner and ran chest-first into me, flushed and loose-limbed with his eyes bright as flares, I was already hard enough to hammer tent stakes.
He jogged off, but then he turned and looked at me and saw, and I stood there in the mud performing the greatest feat of discipline in my career, which was walking back to the formation like a colonel instead of limping back like a teenager.
It didn’t last long. And it hasn’t since.
Every night now, in the dark, with my forearm across my mouth, I grip my cock as I replay the sound Reyes made in that gap.
Yesterday it got so bad I locked myself in the latrine at 1300 like a private, one fist braced on the plywood wall, hating myself in real time and coming anyway with that sound in my head.
And tomorrow, eight new soldiers arrive under my command. Eight new sets of eyes on this base. On me. On him. On whatever this is that I’m apparently no longer able to keep off my own face, because the corner of Reyes’s lips quirks up into a smile.
My fist closes at my side, nails biting into my palm.
I look away first. Again. I pick up Callahan’s file like it contains something urgent and flip it open to a page I’ve already read.
“Reyes takes the fourth hut solo,” I say to the paperwork. “It’s the smallest. Inventory the bunk hardware from supply and distribute to the others.”
“Yes, sir.”
Soft. Devastating.
“Sir.” Hayes again, because it’s always Hayes again. “Question about the new arrivals. Are any of them wom—”
I don’t let him finish. “Bunks and floors, Hayes.”
“Bunks and floors. Yes, sir.” He turns for the door and gets exactly one pace before the commentary resumes at a volume he believes is private. “Eight new people. You know what that means. Eight new people who haven’t heard any of my material.”
“They’ll leave,” Delgado says.
“They’ll stay, Rafael. They’ll stay for the mouse. It’s a whole saga now, there’s lore—”
Okafor follows them out to supervise, which is to say, to stand nearby radiating consequences. Spencer and Petrillo peel off toward supply.
Reyes is last through the door. He pauses with one hand on the frame and glances back at me over his shoulder.
“The fourth hut, sir,” he says. “The small one. Any particular reason I get it to myself?”
There are a dozen safe answers. It’s a one-man job. You work faster alone. Dismissed.
“So you don’t need to run off to get some alone time,” I say before I can stop myself, acknowledging what we both already know.
That I know. That he knows that I know.
First, he blinks at me in surprise. Then his eyes light up with something that could be wicked delight.
Fucking fuck.
“Yes, sir,” he whispers, and goes.
The door swings shut. The hut is quiet except for the generator and the rain starting up again on the roof, and I stand there with Callahan’s file open in my hands, reading nothing and getting harder than a brick.