29. Gabriel
GAbrIEL
Hayes blinks, then grins so widely his face splits in half.
“I knew it!” he whisper-yells. “I called it! I said so, didn’t I, Reyes? I said once the Colonel starts supervising your dental hygiene that—”
“Hayes,” I snap, my blood still ice in my veins. Noah is breathing hard four feet away, looking as pale as I feel.
“Yes, sir?” Hayes asks, oblivious.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “What did you just see, Corporal?”
Hayes tilts his head. “Well, your tongue was in—”
“Tyler,” Noah hisses. “No.”
Hayes looks between us, his mouth opening and closing like a fish on dry land. Then the light finally dawns in those baby blues.
“Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, yeah, no. I didn’t see much, sir. Reyes was in the corner taking a piss, and you were—”
“Hayes,” I interrupt again. “Keep it simple.”
“Yes, sir, I didn’t see anything, sir.”
“Good.” I’m going to have to believe that for the moment, because I am not ready to see our careers flushed down the toilet today. “What were you saying about Wilder, Corporal?”
Hayes points back with a thumb over his shoulder. “He, ah, he’s coming down the path, sir.”
I exchange a glance with Reyes, both of us likely thinking the same thing: if Wilder’s here, where’s Callahan? Then I jog back to the goat trail, the two younger men following.
Wilder comes around the bend at a dead run, chest heaving, rifle in his hands. Blood tracks down the side of his face, dried at the edges, fresh at the source.
“Sergeant.” I catch him by the shoulder before he can barrel past me. “Report.”
He plants his boots, sucks down two full breaths before he can get the words out, and I make myself wait.
“We got split,” he says finally. “Wedge came up between us on descent. Maybe half a dozen, moving fast, cutting the ground between me and Callahan before either of us saw it happen.”
“Where is he now?”
Wilder clenches his jaw. “They took him, sir.”
No one says anything, the mountain quiet.
“Four men,” Wilder says. “I had eyes on it through the scope. They came up on him from the blind side, put a tarp over his head, and walked him off at gunpoint before I could get a good shot lined up. I couldn’t risk him, sir.”
“And you tried to follow?” I ask.
“Yes, sir.” He touches the wound on his cheek. “Got about two hundred meters before somebody put a round an inch off my skull. Had a sniper on me the whole way down. I took cover and waited him out, and by the time I could move, the trail was cold.”
Hayes leans in to look at the cut, then whistles lowly.
“That’s not a stray round,” he says, quieter than anything I’ve heard him say all deployment. “That’s a guy who could have put it through your eye and chose your cheek instead.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s no maybe about it. That’s a message.”
I don’t have time to unpack exactly what kind of message a graze like that is supposed to send. Not while we’re standing on an exposed shelf of rock with the sun coming up and an element still unaccounted for.
“Keep going,” I tell Wilder. “What happened after you broke off?”
“Came down looking for anybody. Ran into Maddox’s team about six hundred meters up.
Told them what happened and Maddox said they’d push forward and try to pick up the trail on Callahan while I came back to report and get you the real picture.
” He swallows. “Didn’t want to leave it to a radio call that might not come through properly. ”
Smart. I’d have done the same thing in his boots, but knowing that doesn’t make it easier to hear that Maddox’s team is somewhere up that ridge chasing four armed men and a hostage with no support behind them yet.
I look at what I actually have standing in front of me.
Sykes, gray-faced on an improvised litter, leg wrapped tight enough to slow the bleeding, but not enough to stop it for good.
Liu, arms bloody to the elbows, running on fumes and adrenaline.
Reyes, upright, unhurt, but burning out.
Wilder, bleeding from a graze that could have easily cracked open his skull.
This is not an element built to chase Border Wolves through unfamiliar terrain. This is an element built to get a wounded man off a mountain before he bleeds out.
“We’re not pushing forward,” I say, shaking my head. “Sykes needs a table, not a foot chase. We move to the vehicles, we get him and Wilder back to the base, and we let the people equipped for the manhunt do the manhunt.”
“Sir, I’m fine,” Wilder begins.
“No, you’re not,” I argue. “You’re exhausted. So are Liu and Reyes. We’ll be lucky if we get off this mountain without encountering another Dravosian patrol.”
That seems to kill the argument, so I key the radio.
“Kestrel, this is Wolfe.”
Static, then Okafor’s voice, steady as bedrock. “Go ahead, sir.”
“Callahan’s been taken, at least four hostiles, moving on foot, direction unknown past the last sighting.
Wilder took contact from a sniper during pursuit, minor injury, mobile.
Sykes is litter-bound, gunshot wound to the leg, needs immediate care on arrival.
Maddox’s team minus Bishop plus Delgado is pushing the last known trail.
I’m bringing Sykes, Wilder, Liu, Reyes, Hayes, Petrillo, and Bishop back to the vehicles now. ”
A pause on his end, longer than radio lag accounts for.
“Copy all,” he says finally. “Drones are refueling. Soon as they’re up again, I’ll task them on Callahan’s last known position and work outward.”
“Do that. And Okafor, tell Maddox to break contact if he doesn’t have eyes on Callahan by nightfall. I’m not losing more men to the same ridge in the same day.”
“Understood, sir. Kestrel out.”
I clip the radio back and turn to my ragtag formation.
“We move as one element,” I tell them. “Petrillo and Bishop, you’re on the litter. Wilder, Liu, you’re behind them. Reyes, Hayes, you’ve got rear security.”
Nobody questions the order of march. We move.
The descent takes even longer than the climb up did.
There’s just no way to move a litter at the same pace as a man carrying his own weight, not to mention that every loose patch of shale costs us a minute of careful footing while Sykes grits his teeth.
I walk in front, and though my eyes are sweeping the horizon for enemies, I let my mind drift to the fact that Hayes caught me kissing Noah.
That Callahan is somewhere out there, hooded and held at gunpoint, a prisoner in the hands of a unit that ties red thread around its wrists and leaves signatures carved in bark. Because it wants to be feared.
It should be the only thing I’m thinking about right now. But it’s not.
Underneath everything, there’s still the echo of Noah’s voice as he told me I love you too, and the way his face changed when he said it, like he set down a weight he’d been carrying since he was ten years old.
I have no right to feel anything close to joy while one of my sergeants is being marched through the mountains by the Border Wolves.
And yet it’s there, under the worry and anger.
I glance back once. Reyes walks rear security with his rifle up and his eyes moving, doing his job, not looking at me. Hayes walks beside him, quiet for once in his life, maybe still processing what he saw.
Sighing, I force my eyes forward again.
Two things are true at the same time. Callahan is gone, and I don’t know if we’ll get him back whole. And Noah Reyes loves me, and said so, on a mountain that nearly took him away from me twice in six weeks.
I don’t know how a man is supposed to carry both of those at once. I only know I have to, because the mountain isn’t about to wait for me to sort shit out.