I appreciated what my father was trying to convey, I understood his concern, but I was not the same person as he had been during his time in the military. I had no baggage, no PTSD, and no worries, other than Gabriel giving me the stink eye and growling at his watch.
“Not happening to me, Dad,” I promised, slapping him on the shoulder. “As you always say, old man, not on your life.”
I had no idea that years later, that cocky statement would come back to haunt me. Such is the misplaced exuberance of a man who was yet to see the darkest side of war.
YEARS LATER
If there was one thing I hated, it was the humid conditions of a tropical jungle. Thick foliage obscuring your line of sight, thousands of fucking insects and tree animals all making noises at the same time, blocking out the sounds of the enemy. Give me the sparse openness of the desert any day of the week.
Putting one foot in front of the other, I willed my body to make it up the steep muddy embankment—the forty-kilo pack on my back making the task harder than necessary. I was in peak physical shape, but this hill just might be my undoing.
I’d separated from Gabe and the team two days ago to get a head start on my objective. Find the hideout of the militia, report back to my captain and sit tight until they arrived.
This was my speciality.
I worked alone sixty percent of the time, infiltrating on covert missions to gather intel, so the team didn’t walk into a clusterfuck. Forewarned was forearmed, and there was no one better than me for the job. My mission name said it all. I was a ghost; I walked amongst the enemy without detection, able to blend in without bringing attention to myself.
Mud squidged under my boots, sinking me to the top of my laces, my hands filthy and pruned from the wet and steaming mud. Reaching the top, I dropped to my belly, years of experience that there was always something waiting for you on the other side. Sinking my face into the mud, I covered my cheeks and hair with the brown sludge before looking over the ridge and instantly heard the rumbling sounds of a vehicle. The road below was more of a goat track; huge potholes and boulders littered the narrow path.
Grill is not going to be happy. Grinning at a memory from our previous deployment listening to Grill’s constant complaining about the rocky terrain in Tarinkot Province, Afghanistan, this muddy shit and goat trail was really going to piss the big fella off.
Reaching for my radio, I sent off a morse code signal, aware that the radio could be heard or being monitored by the rebels.
Seconds later, the response I was waiting for came back in short and sharp bursts.
“The calvary is on the way.” I grinned, hunkering down in the mud to wait for the cover of nightfall before executing the next phase of my mission. Absently, I stroked the long sharp blade of my dagger, my constant companion other than my mind. Doing what I did in Team FIVE meant I spent a lot of time on my own, and frankly, I preferred that. I was not a people person, not any longer. Once, I was the main attraction at a party, the hell-raiser, the loud one. Now, I couldn’t stand being around anyone other than my team brothers and my family back home. Talking wasn’t one of my strong suits; talking meant answering people’s questions. Questions like, what do you do for a living? What is the worst thing you have seen in war? Once, at a party at the compound when I was on leave, a young bloke and his girlfriend, friends of Bastian’s, asked me something similar. And being the dick that I was, I simply answered in a bored monotone.
“I kill people for a living; slit a man’s throat once right through his windpipe, wiped his blood on my pants and kept going.”
Dick move? Fucking oath it was, but fuck me, what kind of person asked a soldier he knew was in a Tier 1 operation what the worst thing was he had seen?
The man’s throat I slit from ear to ear had not long finished raping a young village girl, and her mother laid dead next to her while the pig brutalised her. I had been surveying the compound for three days getting intel for Gabe when I recognised the man as one of the most wanted insurgents on the coalition’s hit list. I tracked him to the small, friendly compound, not knowing that his target would be the small school full of young girls and their mothers. The first feminine scream had me leaving my hiding spot amongst the rocks and sprinting for the hut.
Yeah, I had seen and done some fucked up shit during my time in the army, but I would do it all over again, end the life of rapists and drug lords, hiding behind their uniforms, without missing a beat.
Movement at the bottom of the ravine caught my attention. Two men dressed in army fatigues and rifles over their shoulders were dragging two women by their hair out of a battered jeep. I couldn’t determine the age of the women from this distance, but it was obvious they had not been brought by their own free will. Noticing one of the women’s tops was torn almost off her body, leaving her torso uncovered, I felt the rise of bile in my throat at the image, knowing what was about to happen to her.
Dropping my head, I sighed in resignation. The familiar weight of what I was
