more detrimental than the pain relief it provided. She feared he was now addicted. If so, that was her doing, because she had been unable to bear watching him suffer.
“What happened to you?” she wondered aloud, as a groan rumbled from deep in his chest and his breathing quickened. The scars on his body told of a long history of torture. The more recent wounds told of his fight to escape. Only a strong man could have survived.
Only a warrior.
Who now depended on her for strength.
HIS GMV—GROUND MOBILITY vehicle, which was basically a souped-up humvee—lined up third in the convoy of four vehicles bouncing slowly down a mountain goat path that the locals called a road. Right. Without rappelling gear, on this ice and snow, even the goats would have to be suicidal to take it.
But here they were. Freezing their asses, their toes, their fingers, and anything else the Afghan winter choose to freeze.
He wiped his gloved hand over his jaw, scratching at the stubble and grime. Bone-tired, his ass sore from the long, rough ride, and his reserves depleted from the grueling op, he was more than ready to get back to the post and relieve his weary feet of the boots he’d been wearing for more than seventy-two hours.
“What time is it, Fisher?” he asked his buddy over the grind and whine of the GMV’s engine as it crab-crawled over another pile of fallen rocks and deep drifts of snow.
“Zero dark thirty, Sarge,” Fisher drawled from behind the wheel.
Pat was the team’s weapons specialist, comedic relief, and for a proud Oklahoman who rarely saw snow, he did a damn fine job plowing through the stuff. He slowed the vehicle to maneuver around yet another cluster of white-covered rocks—no easy task wearing night-vision goggles.
“What day is it, Fisher?” he asked around a yawn, then shook his head to wake himself up.
“It’s either Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Possibly Thursday—that is, if it ain’t Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, Sarge.”
He grunted. “Thanks for pinning that down.”
“Anything to make your life more pleasant.”
They took small pleasures when they could—even tolerated Fisher’s stupid jokes—because patrol in and around the Paktia Province, specifically Chamkani, had pitifully few pleasures. The prospect of returning to the post after a cross-border op into Pakistan—bad U.S. Army, shame, shame—was at the top of the pleasure scale tonight. Thoughts of a hot shower—crude as it may be—outranked even the success of their mission to interdict the Taliban supply lines that, of course, the Pakistanis denied even existed.
And there were no poppy fields in Kandahar.
In the bitter cold, the cloudless night sky was a shower of green dots through the frost-coated windshield and the night-vision goggles that every man in the small convoy wore. As team medic, he was happy as hell not to have had to treat any casualties on this mission. Just because they’d survived the op without so much as a paper cut, however, didn’t mean they could let down now. Like the Travelocity gnome, Mr. Taliban was everywhere. Until they reached the remote old Soviet base serving as their temporary home sweet home, he wasn’t going to breathe easy. None of them would.
Every inch of terrain held potential traps. This road in particular. He didn’t like it. Not one bit. Only one way in, only one way out of their target area. It was a target-rich environment for the Taliban, who loved their IEDs and ambushes. That they were about to cross over from Pakistan into Afghanistan meant diddly-squat. The Taliban knew that Special Forces patrols regularly scooted across the very loosely defined border to hunt.
Beside him, Fisher felt uneasy, too. “Don’t mind tellin’ ya, Sarge, I’ll be happy as a pig in slop when we get off this freakin’ stretch of ro—”
BOOM!
A monster blast shocked the air, sucked the breath from his lungs, and sent the GMV airborne.
A cloud of flying snow and rock projectiles enveloped them. The GMV rocketed back to earth, crashed with a bone-jarring thud, rocked and then started to roll. Holding on to anything he could grab, he rode with it, trying to recover his breath from the shock of the explosion. When the rocking stopped, the vehicle had flipped upside down, and so had he. Snow and frigid cold blew in through the broken windshield.
“Fisher!” he yelled, barely hearing his own voice above the ringing in his ears.
The one thing he should have heard above the din he didn’t. The sound of heavy weapons. Which meant no one was able to man them. Which meant they were all in a world of hurt.
“My arm!” Pat roared in pain over the zipping of bullets flying around them. His goggles had been knocked off, but he could see Pat moving around beside him in the dark. He’d clamped his hand over Pat’s upper arm. Blood spurted between his fingers.
More explosions and gunfire echoed around them.
He needed to triage Pat’s arm. He needed to radio for help. The mike dangled over his head. He reached around his rifle sling and grabbed it. “Red Striker Two is hit! Red Striker Two has been IEDed!”
No answer. The radios were probably screwed up in the blast.
Or there was no one left in the convoy to answer.
He craned his neck around to look at the back of the GMV. Simmons and Blanco were crumpled on their heads at odd angles and eerily still. He clawed his way halfway over the seat, tugged his glove off with his teeth, and checked their carotid arteries. Nothing. They were dead.
“Can you move?” he yelled to Fisher.
“Like… Jagger,” Fisher managed, a smart-ass to the end.
He quickly applied a tourniquet to Fisher’s arm.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here!”
Pain screamed through his leg as he dragged himself out of the half-open GMV door into a night lit with tracers, burning vehicles, and thick black smoke. Gunfire echoed around him. Gunfire and the screams of men hurt and dying.
“Go. Go. Go. I’ll cover!”
With his M-4 in hand, he fired from the cover of the vehicle, giving Fisher a chance to run for an outcropping ten yards away. He dropped one AK-wielding thug. Then another. But not before they nailed Fisher.
Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ. Fisher was down. The guys in the back were dead. He swallowed back rage and overwhelming sorrow.
Bullets pounded the snowdrifts around him. Muscle memory, training, and instinct kicked in, and he became what he’d been trained to be. A soldier. A soldier who had been marked.
He had to move. He grabbed the door and hauled himself to his feet. His right leg gave out, and he collapsed in the snow as knife-like pain screamed through his shin.
He swore through a groan when he caught his breath then fought from the ground. He laid down a burst of fire, then started dragging himself toward Fisher, cutting a path in the snow with his body. Then he roared in anger and horror when he realized that half of Fisher’s head was blown off. Red blood stained white snow and bled to black in the dark.
Fighting tears, using his buddy’s body for cover, and running on rage and adrenaline, he fired off several more bursts, then dragged himself to the rock outcropping and hunkered down behind it, nailing another two bad guys on the way.
Winded, reeling with pain, he chanced a peek around the rock and assessed his situation. When he saw what was left of the convoy, he knew he would die here.
