20. Noah
NOAH
The first few seconds of the ambush, the only thing I know is where my rounds are going.
Gully. Shape moving. Squeeze. Shape drops.
Treeline. Muzzle flash. Squeeze, squeeze. The flash stops.
My headspace is the same as when I was cornered in Orsha Valley, and my hands stay steady even when the ground kicks dirt in my face from a round that missed me by inches. I find the next target and take it.
Then Spencer goes down, and I work hard to tell myself I need to keep going, keep eliminating the enemy. I can’t think about burying a friend again, not now. All I can do is make sure the enemy doesn’t get a chance to bring anyone else down.
But then I hear another wet thump of a round finding meat, and I hear Petrillo shout out. When I turn my head to check who got hit, Colonel Gabriel Wolfe is already going down.
My heart freezes in my chest.
He goes down hard, and for three endless seconds, he doesn’t move at all, doesn’t make a sound. I’ve seen men get hit before. I know what a body looks like when it stops being a person you can talk to.
“Colonel!”
It rips out of me before I can stop it, too loud, way too much feeling in it for a battlefield, and a distant tactical part of my brain scolds me for telling every shooter on the opposite side who the man they just shot is. But I can’t make myself care.
Then he moves. He gets a knee under himself, and even wounded, even bleeding, his voice comes out hard and sharp enough to cut through gunfire.
“Down. Stay in position.”
I can’t. I can’t because just then something happens in my brain that I don’t have the words to describe.
The fear is still there, yes, it’s cold, it’s huge, but it’s not the kind of fear that would make me lock in place anymore.
It turns into something violent. I’ve never been scared like this, scared in a way that turns into rage so fast it makes my head spin.
He’s hit. Someone on the other side put a round in him, and I’m going to make every single one of them pay for it.
I come up off the ground and start moving.
“Reyes, get back!”
His voice again, ragged. I hear someone firing, maybe him, giving me cover, and maybe I should feel grateful, but I don’t have time for that. There’s a muzzle flash twenty meters up the slope, and I’m not about to let them get another shot in. I run at it.
This isn’t the smart bound-by-pairs peel we drilled a hundred times.
I’m just going straight at the green flashes of light, my weapon up, my hands doing the rest. I bring down one man, then another.
There’s a shape moving behind a boulder to my left, and I put two rounds into the rock an inch from his skull. The third one doesn’t miss.
A round snaps past my ear close enough that I feel the heat, but I don’t flinch. There’s too much of that furious fear inside me, the sound of Gabriel getting hit and falling to the ground, and the only thing drowning it out is putting another shooter down.
“Reyes, left!” Okafor’s voice sounds behind me, and I swing without thinking. A man is rising out of the gully with his rifle coming up, and I fire without even aiming. He goes down into the rocks and doesn’t get back up.
The gully is empty now, and for a second there’s nothing but the ragged sound of my breath, smoke drifting across the tree line through my goggles. But I don’t stop.
There’s a shape at the far end of the cache, crouched behind a crate, trying to work the bolt on a rifle that’s jammed. In normal circumstances, I’d do the smart thing, use the terrain, flank him, work in pairs. But smart Noah has left the battlefield. I walk straight into him instead.
He gets the bolt free just as I close the last ten meters, and I put him down before he can bring the muzzle up.
Two rounds to the chest. I don’t even feel the recoil.
I feel weightless. Hollow. Like the only thing keeping me upright is making sure nobody else on this mountain gets the chance to put a bullet in Gabriel Wolfe.
“Reyes!” Okafor’s voice cracks like a whip this time, close, and a hand closes around the back of my vest and hauls me sideways behind a boulder hard enough to knock the air out of me. “The fuck are you doing?”
“Colonel’s hit.” My own voice sounds strange to me. Flat. “I’m clearing the gully.”
“You’re clearing yourself a grave.” Okafor’s face is inches from mine, dark eyes furious in the green wash of the goggles. “We hold this line together or we don’t hold it at all. You want him to get killed covering for a dead man?”
That does the trick. The fear seeps through the cracks his words made, cold again, kicking my pulse up. Gabriel.
Gunfire slows. Delgado’s still getting some shots in as Hayes shouts into the radio, calling for exfil with a voice gone hoarse. The enemy fire, what’s left of it, is thinning out, retreating.
“Cease fire,” Okafor calls to our team, and it takes a moment, but the shooting dies out into ringing silence and drifting smoke.
I’m already moving before he finishes the sentence, back down the slope, past the boulder where Gabriel went down, and my heart is trying to climb out through my throat because I don’t see him standing.
I see Petrillo first. Kneeling next to Spencer, hands moving fast, methodical. And propped against the boulder with his jaw locked tight against the pain and a field dressing already dark with blood, breathing hard through his nose…
Gabriel. Alive. Awake. Furious, if the look on his face is anything to go by.
The relief hits me so hard my knees actually buckle for a second, and I have to plant a hand against the rock to keep from going down in front of everyone.
“Report,” Gabriel grinds out, and even shot, even bleeding, the man is trying to run this ambush like it’s a staff meeting.
“Multiple enemies KIA in the gully, one at the cache,” Okafor answers, coming up behind me. “Petrillo is stabilizing Spencer for transport. Enemy’s broken contact.”
Gabriel’s eyes find me, sharp despite the pain, and in them I see anger, and maybe fear too.
“You were told to hold position,” he says.
My mouth is dry. The rage has nowhere to go now that the shooting’s stopped, and it curdles in my chest along with the fear.
“You got shot,” I say. It’s not an excuse—it’s just the only answer I have.
“Wasn’t your job to get justice, Reyes.”
“Wasn’t going to leave it to someone else,” I counter.
Hayes glances between us, wisely saying nothing for a change. Okafor’s already moving to check on Spencer, but he gives us one last look that says the conversation isn’t finished.
Gabriel’s jaw works like he wants to say something, probably chew me out some more, but then his eyes drop to my vest, to my hands still curled around my rifle, checking me like he did after I went over the ledge with that flanker.
“You’re not hit,” he says quietly. It’s half a question and half relief, and he doesn’t bother to hide it well.
“No, sir.”
His jaw relaxes just a fraction even through the pain.
“Good,” he says hoarsely, and for one moment it’s not the Colonel talking. It’s just Gabriel, hurt and bleeding, and looking at me like I worried him more than the round in his shoulder ever could.
Then Okafor’s voice cuts through the moment, calling for a detailed casualty report, securing the perimeter, and getting ready for extraction, and we’re back to rank and duty.
Gabriel’s face goes hard again, and I stand there a moment longer, letting the fact that he’s breathing sink in, before Petrillo tells me to make myself useful and help him with Spencer.
My hands are shaking. They didn’t shake once while I was killing people. They’re shaking now because Gabriel’s alive, and because I realized there’s no duty as important to me as making sure this mountain doesn’t take him from me.