Page 24 of My Forbidden Commander

The third time we stop, I lower down on a knee beside a boulder and check my sector. At the end of the line of men, Wolfe goes down on a knee too, checking the way we came. Keeping the rear secure, just like I did not long ago. I know what it feels like to be the last thing between everyone’s back and the dark. Was Wolfe looking back at me like this as well?

But tonight he gave me the front and took the back for himself. I file that away in a growing folder of things I’m not supposed to feel about my commanding officer.

The fourth time we stop is where the stream narrows, walls of rock climbing on both sides. Okafor’s fist comes up ahead of me and freezes the column.

I sink back to my knee and listen. I hear water trickling, wind combing through the pines, and something faint that sounds wrong. Like rock knocking against rock somewhere ahead and above.

Ahead of me, Okafor makes fast and deliberate hand signals. Movement. Front. Multiple.

I pass it down the line and bring my rifle up. As soon as I put my eye behind the optic, I see them. Six of them, maybe seven, coming down the far side of the stream in a file of their own, three hundred meters out. They move well—spaced out, quiet, weapons ready. Then again, if the enemy were shit at playing war, the war would have been over long ago. But they’re walking a route that’s about to cross ours at the bottom of a rock funnel.

They don’t know we’re here. Yet.

The radio clicks against my ear, and Wolfe’s voice comes through barely louder than a breath.

“All elements hold. Weapons tight. Let them pass.”

Smart. No one would win a gunfight here in the dark. We’d just find out who bleeds faster. I flatten myself against the rocks and watch the green shapes make their way down the slope.

It works for about thirty seconds. They make their way north, sliding right past us with two hundred meters of darkness between us, and tomorrow they won’t know just how close they⁠—

The point man stops.

He crouches, and his head comes up as he scans around the stream. I watch him lift something to his face, and I know what he’s doing. He’s got thermal vision, and there’s a line of Americans on this side of the stream lighting things up like a runway.

“Contact—” Okafor starts, but gunfire explodes before the last syllable leaves his mouth.

Muzzle flashes spark on the other side of the slope, a whitish green through my goggles. Rock splinters off the boulder in front of me and stings my cheek. I put my laser where the point man’s gun flashes and press the trigger, firing three rounds. The flash stops.

“Break contact!” Wolfe yells over the noise, his voice steely. “Peel right, bounds by pairs! Rally at the bend!”

That’s how we drill. You don’t stand and slug it out with an unknown force in a funnel—you leapfrog backward, half the guns firing while the other half runs. Okafor grabs my shoulder, and we’re the first pair up, sprinting low across the rocks while Delgado and Spencer fire over our heads. Then we drop and turn, burning our magazines so they can run past us. Petrillo and Hayes leapfrog through as the Dravosians shoot at muzzle flashes and shadows, rounds cracking overhead.

Two bounds. Three. It’s working. Once we’re around the bend, we’ll have hard cover. I drop behind a slab with Okafor, swap magazines, and come up to cover the next pair.

That’s when I see them.

Two shapes, on our left, high, moving fast along a goat trail above the stream. Flankers. While their patrol kept us busy and our heads down, they climbed, and they ran past our whole column, and now they’re dropping down on the far side of the bend.

Right on top of the rally point. Right on top of the man peeling backward toward it.

Wolfe.

He’s forty meters from me, bounding back alone from the trail position, and his focus is exactly where it should be—behind him, on the enemy patrol, on covering his own men. The flankers are above and left, in his blind spot, and one of them is already going prone on a shelf of rock with a straight shot down at him.

“Left flank high!” I scream into the radio and out loud at the same time, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just too fucking noisy, Wolfe is in the open, and the man on the shelf is settling behind his rifle with all the time in the world.

I don’t have a shot from here, the shelf blocking my angle. There’s only the open ground of the valley floor between me and the base of that slope, sixty meters of moonlit gravel.

Okafor grabs for my drag handle. “Reyes⁠—”

I’m already gone.

I run the sixty meters with my brain switched off, my body on autopilot. Just like in that cellar. Rounds snap past me on my right, somebody on the slope tracking me. Gravel kicks up in little fountains, but I don’t weave, because weaving is slower. So I just run.

The slope comes up, and I hit it running, climbing with my hands and boots, my rifle banging against my chest. The second flanker hears me. He turns on the trail above and swings his weapon down. I shoot him from four meters below, two rounds in the chest that knock him back off the trail.

The man on the shelf is six meters away, lying prone, cheek against the stock, his finger tightening on a trigger aimed for my colonel.