NOAH
“Patrol,” he murmurs. “Wire in fifteen.”
We dress in the dark because the Colonel said we need to be able to find our kit like this, and we take his orders seriously. I pull my boots and vest on just as Hayes starts muttering about ghosting his morning coffee.
Outside, the cold is a slap to the face. There’s no fog tonight, and the sky is clear for a change, the stars brighter and clearer than most people ever get to experience.
“Huh,” Petrillo says from beside me. “Who knew this place could be beautiful.”
“Cold, though. I miss the desert sometimes,” Spencer says. As always, that’s all that Spencer says.
As we form up at the gate, I notice a seventh silhouette waiting, rifle slung over his shoulder, breath misting in the cold.
Wolfe.
“Order of march,” Okafor says quietly. “I’ve got point. Reyes, two. Delgado, Spencer, Petrillo, Hayes. Colonel walks trail.”
I try to keep the surprise off my face. He put himself in the rear, exactly where he put me two weeks ago, and now he’s giving me the spot I grease-penciled onto his board my second night here.
I look at him across the dark. He looks at the ridge.
“Move,” he says.
We move through the wire, leaving the base behind. I wonder why he joined patrol again. Most colonels would be sleeping in their warm huts, expecting team leaders to report in when the mission’s over. I resist the urge to look over my shoulder to see if I can read it on his face.
Night patrol is a different animal. With the goggles on, the world goes green and grainy, everything picking up a soft glow.
The route tonight loops north of Hill 604, along a stream we didn’t bother to name, and we move in bounds, stopping to listen, to watch.
The mountains are so quiet at night, sometimes my own pulse sounds like footsteps.
The third time we stop, I lower down on a knee beside a boulder and check my sector.
At the end of the line of men, Wolfe goes down on a knee too, checking the way we came.
Keeping the rear secure, just like I did not long ago.
I know what it feels like to be the last thing between everyone’s back and the dark.
Was Wolfe looking back at me like this as well?
But tonight he gave me the front and took the back for himself. I file that away in a growing folder of things I’m not supposed to feel about my commanding officer.
The fourth time we stop is where the stream narrows, walls of rock climbing on both sides. Okafor’s fist comes up ahead of me and freezes the column.
I sink back to my knee and listen. I hear water trickling, wind combing through the pines, and something faint that sounds wrong. Like rock knocking against rock somewhere ahead and above.
Ahead of me, Okafor makes fast and deliberate hand signals. Movement. Front. Multiple.
I pass it down the line and bring my rifle up.
As soon as I put my eye behind the optic, I see them.
Six of them, maybe seven, coming down the far side of the stream in a file of their own, three hundred meters out.
They move well—spaced out, quiet, weapons ready.
Then again, if the enemy were shit at playing war, the war would have been over long ago.
But they’re walking a route that’s about to cross ours at the bottom of a rock funnel.
They don’t know we’re here. Yet.
The radio clicks against my ear, and Wolfe’s voice comes through barely louder than a breath.
“All elements hold. Weapons tight. Let them pass.”
Smart. No one would win a gunfight here in the dark. We’d just find out who bleeds faster. I flatten myself against the rocks and watch the green shapes make their way down the slope.
It works for about thirty seconds. They make their way north, sliding right past us with two hundred meters of darkness between us, and tomorrow they won’t know just how close they—
The point man stops.
He crouches, and his head comes up as he scans around the stream. I watch him lift something to his face, and I know what he’s doing. He’s got thermal vision, and there’s a line of Americans on this side of the stream lighting things up like a runway.
“Contact—” Okafor starts, but gunfire explodes before the last syllable leaves his mouth.
Muzzle flashes spark on the other side of the slope, a whitish green through my goggles. Rock splinters off the boulder in front of me and stings my cheek. I put my laser where the point man’s gun flashes and press the trigger, firing three rounds. The flash stops.
“Break contact!” Wolfe yells over the noise, his voice steely. “Peel right, bounds by pairs! Rally at the bend!”
That’s how we drill. You don’t stand and slug it out with an unknown force in a funnel—you leapfrog backward, half the guns firing while the other half runs.
Okafor grabs my shoulder, and we’re the first pair up, sprinting low across the rocks while Delgado and Spencer fire over our heads.
Then we drop and turn, burning our magazines so they can run past us.
Petrillo and Hayes leapfrog through as the Dravosians shoot at muzzle flashes and shadows, rounds cracking overhead.
Two bounds. Three. It’s working. Once we’re around the bend, we’ll have hard cover. I drop behind a slab with Okafor, swap magazines, and come up to cover the next pair.
That’s when I see them.
Two shapes, on our left, high, moving fast along a goat trail above the stream. Flankers. While their patrol kept us busy and our heads down, they climbed, and they ran past our whole column, and now they’re dropping down on the far side of the bend.
Right on top of the rally point. Right on top of the man peeling backward toward it.
Wolfe.
He’s forty meters from me, bounding back alone from the trail position, and his focus is exactly where it should be—behind him, on the enemy patrol, on covering his own men.
The flankers are above and left, in his blind spot, and one of them is already going prone on a shelf of rock with a straight shot down at him.
“Left flank high!” I scream into the radio and out loud at the same time, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just too fucking noisy, Wolfe is in the open, and the man on the shelf is settling behind his rifle with all the time in the world.
I don’t have a shot from here, the shelf blocking my angle. There’s only the open ground of the valley floor between me and the base of that slope, sixty meters of moonlit gravel.
Okafor grabs for my drag handle. “Reyes—”
I’m already gone.
I run the sixty meters with my brain switched off, my body on autopilot. Just like in that cellar. Rounds snap past me on my right, somebody on the slope tracking me. Gravel kicks up in little fountains, but I don’t weave, because weaving is slower. So I just run.
The slope comes up, and I hit it running, climbing with my hands and boots, my rifle banging against my chest. The second flanker hears me. He turns on the trail above and swings his weapon down. I shoot him from four meters below, two rounds in the chest that knock him back off the trail.
The man on the shelf is six meters away, lying prone, cheek against the stock, his finger tightening on a trigger aimed for my colonel.
No time to aim.
I dive onto him, and we go over the edge of the shelf together, his rifle going off once and firing into nothing as we drop.
The floor comes up fast and hits us both like a truck.
I grunt as white-hot pain announces itself from my side.
He’s under me, then he’s not—he’s strong, hands scrabbling for the knife on his vest, and I get my forearm across his throat and my knee on his weapon arm and my sidearm out of its holster, and I don’t hear the shot.
I feel it, twice, through my own wrist, and he stops.
I stay there, kneeling on a dead man in a riverbed with a firefight still going on around me, my chest heaving and my ears ringing.
The shooting stutters out as the Dravosians break the other way—they’ve lost their point man and both flankers, and I don’t think they wanted this fight any more than we did. Gravel crunches, boots heading my way, and my pistol is up before my brain even processes the shape.
Gabriel.
He knocks the muzzle aside with the back of his hand, grabs the front of my vest with both fists, and hauls me off the body and against the rock wall hard enough to rattle my teeth. Under the goggles I can’t read his eyes, but his fists are shaking, and Gabriel Wolfe’s hands do not shake.
“What,” he asks, so quiet it’s worse than shouting, “was that?”
“Flankers.” My voice sounds like my throat’s been sandpapered. “Shelf. He had you dead to rights, sir. No angle from my position.”
“You crossed sixty meters of open ground under effective fire.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Alone. Off the drill. Away from your pair.”
“Yes, sir.”
His grip tightens on my vest. For one insane second, pressed against a rock wall in the dark with his fists at my collar and his breath rolling hot across my face, I honestly can’t tell whether he’s going to court-martial me or kiss me.
God help me, I know what my body is voting for.
My veins feel like they’re on fire with anticipation.
Okafor’s voice through the radio puts a stop to that. “Colonel. Consolidating at the bend. Petrillo’s asking for a casualty count.”
Gabriel lets go and steps back. He’s the colonel again in the space of one breath.
“Two enemy bodies, this position. Reyes—” He turns his head to me again and gives me a once-over. Then his hand presses flat against my ribs and comes back dark. “You’re hit.”
I look down. My side is wet. And now that he’s pointed it out, it decides to hurt.
“Petrillo,” Gabriel says into the radio, voice clipped. “Rear position. Now.”
Petrillo materializes out of the dark, shoves my vest up, and shines a light at my side. His fingers are quick and impersonal, and after a moment he exhales.
“Round skipped off a rock or something, took a bite out of him. Through the meat, no keepers.” He packs it, tapes it, pats my shoulder once. “You’ll want a shower before I stitch it. You smell like a grave.”
I laugh, but it comes out like a wheeze. “That’s just the adrenaline.”
We stagger back to the rally point. Hayes has a cut on his cheek, and I can see the story about it already loading. Delgado and Spencer are untouched, and Okafor’s doing a headcount and gets us moving. Like nothing happened, like there aren’t bodies cooling behind us.
I walk at number two all the way back to base, feeling him behind me. Thinking about how close his face was to mine, those gray eyes silver with anger.
We break apart at the wire, the patrol splitting off toward chow or bunks or showers. The debrief will come at a more civilized hour. I’m three steps toward the med hut when his voice stops me.
“Reyes.”
I turn and face Gabriel. He’s standing illuminated by the gate light, his rifle on his shoulder. He’s not angry anymore. The emotion on his face is so much worse. Or better. I can’t fucking decide.
“That was the single most reckless thing I have seen a soldier do in twenty-two years,” he says.
I fight to keep my face straight and my voice level.
“Yes, sir.”
A muscle works in his jaw. His eyes drop to my side, to the blood dried black on my shirt, and come back up.
“Thank you,” he says.
Then he walks toward the command hut before I can answer, and I stand there in the mud, shot, exhausted, grinning at his back like an absolute idiot.
Fucking worth it.