NOAH
I’m checking my gear, but my hands keep drifting back to a strap I’ve already tightened twice.
It takes me a full minute standing outside the supply hut to admit to myself that it isn’t about the strap.
It’s about the way Gabriel looked at me last night—just a few hours ago—when we talked about Callahan requesting me for the overnight push.
“I know the brief, sir,” I replied.
“I know you know the brief.” He rubbed a hand down his face. “I’m not cleared to go with you.”
“I know that too.”
“That’s not reassuring, Reyes.”
I climbed into his lap instead of arguing, because arguing wasn’t going to change the mission and it definitely wasn’t going to relax him.
I rode him slowly as both of us tried to be quiet.
His good hand was splayed across my hip, and his bad hand was resting on the mattress while I did all the work, just like every night since he tore that stitch.
He came apart under me with his teeth pressed into my shoulder to keep from making noise, and after, lying tangled together in that narrow bunk, he said the thing that’s been rattling in my skull since 0400 this morning.
“Come back in one piece. That’s an order, not a request.”
Daddy bear. I didn’t say it to his face, because he would have found some way to turn me over his knee for real, but that’s what he is. A man who runs task forces and buries soldiers for a living, worried sick about one specialist heading out with a team he barely knows.
I shoulder my ruck at the wire and force my brain to switch tracks, because I can’t be thinking about Gabriel Wolfe’s hands or his dick or the sounds he makes when I ride him into next week.
I’m walking into unfamiliar mountains with four men I’ve hardly worked with, and a hard-on at the wrong moment could be embarrassing. Or dangerous. One of those.
Callahan meets me at the gate. “Reyes. Glad to see your team let you off the leash for this one.”
“Isn’t much of a leash, Sergeant,” I reply.
“Sure,” he mumbles. “You’re walking three, behind Wilder. He likes a second set of eyes on his blind side.”
Wilder’s already at the front of the file, and when I fall in behind him, he greets me with a nod before turning forward again. Always alert, it feels.
Sykes brings up the rear with the radio, and Liu walks behind me with the aid bag. Together, we step off into a morning so cold, I can literally see my breath freeze.
We climb for six hours before Callahan calls the first real halt, and by then my legs have stopped complaining and started just doing the work I require from them.
“Water,” Callahan says, and we drop into a loose perimeter behind a shelf of gray rock, five men facing five directions.
Sykes opens his canteen and looks at me like he’s been dying to ask me a question the whole time we climbed. “You’re the one who found the range card.”
I shake my head. “Wasn’t just me.”
“Wolfe’s report said it was.”
“Wolfe exaggerates.”
Sykes snorts. “Guy doesn’t seem like the exaggerating type.”
He doesn’t, and I don’t have a good answer, so I drink my water and look at the ridge instead of Sykes’s face, which looks a bit too curious for my comfort.
“You believe the stuff about the red thread?” Liu asks, not looking up from where he’s retying his boot laces. “My last posting, a guy swore up and down he found one tied to a fence post, right where a sniper had been dug in for three days.”
“I’ve heard it,” I say.
“Delgado tell you? He tells everybody.” Sykes grins. “Guy’s got a folklore degree nobody asked for.”
“He’s not wrong about most of it, though,” Wilder says.
We go quiet, because Wilder doesn’t speak all that often, and we want to hear what he has to say now.
“I saw one,” he continues, eyes still on his scope as he wipes the lens with a cloth. “Not the thread. The wolf’s head mark. Back at my last posting, on a support beam in a bombed school. None of us slept right for a week after that.”
“Comforting,” Sykes mutters. “Real comforting, Finn.”
Wilder shrugs. “You asked.”
Callahan checks his watch and stands, ending the conversation before it can spiral further. “Load up. Four more hours until OP.”
We climb again. The terrain gets meaner the higher we go—loose shale that slides under a boot no matter how carefully you plant it, scrub pine clawing at clothes and rucks, a wind that finds every seam in my jacket and works on it like a pry bar.
I keep my eyes on Wilder’s back and my sector, and when my mind wanders, I drag it back to the mountain instead of the mountain of things I want to be doing to Gabriel when I get home.
By late afternoon, we reach a shelf overlooking a saddle in the pass, and Callahan calls it. “This is it.”
Wilder’s already moving, scanning for the position that gives him the widest field with the least exposure, and he settles behind a jumble of rocks that took him four seconds to identify as the best cover on the whole shelf.
Liu and Sykes start setting perimeter, and I help Callahan clear a spot for the sleeping bags, tucked back under an overhang where the wind can’t reach, and the rock face breaks up our heat signature.
“Two-hour watch rotations,” Callahan says. “I’ll take the first. You and Wilder, second. Sykes and Liu, third.”
“Copy.”
Nights creep up on you in these mountains.
Sometimes it feels like someone cutting the power on a timer.
I eat a cold ration, half-listening to Sykes and Liu whisper about whether the stars look different this far east, and when my two hours of rest are up and Callahan’s boot connects gently with my sleeping bag, I roll out and take my post beside Wilder without a word passing between us that isn’t necessary.
The watch is quiet. The pass below sits empty, moonlight silver on the rocks, and I spend most of my two hours doing the thing I told myself I wouldn’t do—thinking about a narrow bunk a full day’s march away, and the man in it, sleeping alone tonight for the first time in over a week.
I got used to that fast. Too fast. Used to his heartbeat under my ear, his hand in mine, his low and rough voice telling me to stay. Out here, with nothing but rock and Wilder’s silent presence three feet away, I feel his absence even stronger.
When my watch ends, I crawl back into the sleeping bag, and it feels smaller than it ever has, even though it’s been the same my whole career. I fall asleep anyway, because a soldier who can’t fall asleep on command is a soldier who gets someone killed.
It’s past midnight when the first round comes, close enough to kick rock dust into my mouth before I’m even fully awake.
“Contact!” Callahan’s voice, already up and moving. “Stand to, stand to!”
I’m out of the bag and behind the nearest boulder before my brain finishes processing the sound, rifle up, goggles down, the world turning green.
Muzzle flashes bloom from three directions at once—the saddle below, the ridgeline above, a jumble of rocks to our east that we thought weren’t climbable without ropes.
“They’re on the high ground!” Wilder shouts, already firing, his rounds cracking out at a rhythm too steady to be panic. “East side, above the shelf!”
“Liu, Sykes, cover the saddle!” Callahan’s voice cuts through the chaos, flat and hard. “Reyes, with me! We push the east flank before they get plunging fire on the whole position!”
I move with him, staying low, and the rocks around us start chipping apart under fire that’s coming from too many angles for five men to answer.
It’s different than the ambush at the cache.
We had direction then. Here, we’re completely surrounded.
The shots just keep coming, wave after wave of muzzle flashes from positions that seem to multiply every time I blink.
“How many?” I shout at Callahan as we drop behind a slab.
“Too many,” he shouts back. That’s not an answer designed to make me feel better.
We trade fire with the east flank for what feels like ten minutes and turns out, when I check my watch, to be closer to forty.
Every time we push them back a few meters, they reposition and open from someplace new.
This is discipline. This is a unit that planned for exactly this kind of resistance and brought enough bodies to absorb it.
Sykes goes down behind us with a cry that turns my blood to ice.
“Sykes is hit!” Liu’s voice a moment later. “Leg, it’s bad, I need hands!”
Callahan doesn’t hesitate. “Reyes, hold this flank. I’ve got Sykes.”
He’s gone before I can argue, and suddenly it’s just me on the east side of the shelf, with rounds coming closer and closer. So I do the only thing that’s ever worked for me in a moment like this. I stop being scared and start being efficient.
Breathe. Find the flash. Fire. Breathe. Find the next one.
An hour crawls by like that, maybe more. My magazines empty faster than I want to admit, and every time I think the pressure’s easing, another burst comes from a slightly different angle, testing, probing, looking for a gap that isn’t there yet.
Wilder’s rifle cracks at a slower rhythm, methodical, and every time it fires, something out in the dark stops moving. He’s not wasting a single round. I count eleven shots from him over what feels like two hours, and I’d bet everything I own that eleven men are down because of it.
“Reyes, status!” Callahan’s voice, closer now. Sykes must be patched up enough to be quiet instead of screaming.
“Holding!” I shout back. “They’re not pushing through, but they’re not backing off either!”
“Same everywhere.” He drops down beside me, breathing hard, blood on his hands. “I don’t think this is a raid. They came to fix us in place.”
“For what?”
“Don’t know. Don’t like not knowing.”
The moon shifts across the sky, and I lose count of how many magazines I’ve gone through, how many times my rifle’s gone dry and I’ve swapped without thinking, muscle memory doing what my exhausted brain can’t keep up with. The cold stops registering. My hands stop shaking.
Liu crawls past with a fresh dressing for Sykes, and in the green light of my goggles, I catch his face—young, scared but holding it together—and that steadies me further.
“They’re not falling back,” Wilder says at some point, voice flat even now. “Every time we thin one position, another opens up. This is a big element. Bigger than anything we’ve seen.”
“Copy that,” Callahan mutters, and keys the radio with hands that seem to tremble. “Kestrel, Kestrel, this is Callahan. We are pinned down, taking fire from multiple elevated positions, one casualty, requesting immediate QRF and air support, do you copy?”
Static answers, making my stomach drop.
“Kestrel, this is Callahan. We are in a sustained firefight, hours now, no let-up, request immediate support, over.”
I lie there in the dark with an empty magazine in my hand and another mountain’s worth of muzzle flashes lighting up the ridge above us, and all I can think, underneath the fear and the noise and the ringing in my ears, is that Gabriel is asleep a world away, with no idea that the man he told to come back in one piece might not get the choice.