Page 40 of My Forbidden Commander

The shout comes from behind me, voice high and cracking, nothing like the flat voice that’s been counting off kills the last ninety seconds. I know without looking that it’s Noah, because nobody else on this mountain would ever say that word like it might be the last time they get to say it.

Don’t. I want to shout at him even though my lungs don’t cooperate. Don’t let them hear that. Don’t let Okafor hear that.

I force my good arm under me, get up onto one knee, blood already soaking my sleeve. I push the words out, imbuing my voice with command.

“Down. Stay in position.”

It’s not enough. I see him through the chaos, thirty meters up the slope, and he’s not staying in position. He’s moving forward instead of holding the line, closing the distance on muzzle flashes like his cover doesn’t matter.

He puts a round through a man’s throat at twenty meters and doesn’t slow down to confirm it. He swings at the next flash and fires again, closer this time. Close enough that if he takes another two steps, whoever’s shooting from that gully has a clean angle on him.

“Reyes!” I get my rifle up despite the fire tearing down my arm and fire into the gully, giving him the cover he doesn’t seem to think he needs. “Get back!”

He doesn’t get back. He gets closer, and the last thing I see before Petrillo’s hands are on my shoulder, before the world narrows down to pressure and pain and a voice telling me to be still, is Noah Reyes running straight into the thickest part of this fight.

20

NOAH

The first few seconds of the ambush, the only thing I know is where my rounds are going.

Gully. Shape moving. Squeeze. Shape drops.

Treeline. Muzzle flash. Squeeze, squeeze. The flash stops.

My headspace is the same as when I was cornered in Orsha Valley, and my hands stay steady even when the ground kicks dirt in my face from a round that missed me by inches. I find the next target and take it.

Then Spencer goes down, and I work hard to tell myself I need to keep going, keep eliminating the enemy. I can’t think about burying a friend again, not now. All I can do is make sure the enemy doesn’t get a chance to bring anyone else down.

But then I hear another wet thump of a round finding meat, and I hear Petrillo shout out. When I turn my head to check who got hit, Colonel Gabriel Wolfe is already going down.

My heart freezes in my chest.

He goes down hard, and for three endless seconds, he doesn’t move at all, doesn’t make a sound. I’ve seen men get hit before. I know what a body looks like when it stops being a person you can talk to.

“Colonel!”

It rips out of me before I can stop it, too loud, way too much feeling in it for a battlefield, and a distant tactical part of my brain scolds me for telling every shooter on the opposite side who the man they just shot is. But I can’t make myself care.

Then he moves. He gets a knee under himself, and even wounded, even bleeding, his voice comes out hard and sharp enough to cut through gunfire.

“Down. Stay in position.”

I can’t. I can’t because just then something happens in my brain that I don’t have the words to describe. The fear is still there, yes, it’s cold, it’s huge, but it’s not the kind of fear that would make me lock in place anymore. It turns into something violent. I’ve never been scared like this, scared in a way that turns into rage so fast it makes my head spin.

He’s hit. Someone on the other side put a round in him, and I’m going to make every single one of them pay for it.

I come up off the ground and start moving.

“Reyes, get back!”

His voice again, ragged. I hear someone firing, maybe him, giving me cover, and maybe I should feel grateful, but I don’t have time for that. There’s a muzzle flash twenty meters up the slope, and I’m not about to let them get another shot in. I run at it.

This isn’t the smart bound-by-pairs peel we drilled a hundred times. I’m just going straight at the green flashes of light, my weapon up, my hands doing the rest. I bring down one man, then another. There’s a shape moving behind a boulder to my left, and I put two rounds into the rock an inch from his skull. The third one doesn’t miss.

A round snaps past my ear close enough that I feel the heat, but I don’t flinch. There’s too much of that furious fear inside me, the sound of Gabriel getting hit and falling to the ground, and the only thing drowning it out is putting another shooter down.

“Reyes, left!” Okafor’s voice sounds behind me, and I swing without thinking. A man is rising out of the gully with his rifle coming up, and I fire without even aiming. He goes down into the rocks and doesn’t get back up.