Page 53 of My Forbidden Commander

“Delgado tell you? He tells everybody.” Sykes grins. “Guy’s got a folklore degree nobody asked for.”

“He’s not wrong about most of it, though,” Wilder says.

We go quiet, because Wilder doesn’t speak all that often, and we want to hear what he has to say now.

“I saw one,” he continues, eyes still on his scope as he wipes the lens with a cloth. “Not the thread. The wolf’s head mark. Back at my last posting, on a support beam in a bombed school. None of us slept right for a week after that.”

“Comforting,” Sykes mutters. “Real comforting, Finn.”

Wilder shrugs. “You asked.”

Callahan checks his watch and stands, ending the conversation before it can spiral further. “Load up. Four more hours until OP.”

We climb again. The terrain gets meaner the higher we go—loose shale that slides under a boot no matter how carefully you plant it, scrub pine clawing at clothes and rucks, a wind that finds every seam in my jacket and works on it like a pry bar. I keep my eyes on Wilder’s back and my sector, and when my mind wanders, I drag it back to the mountain instead of the mountain of things I want to be doing to Gabriel when I get home.

By late afternoon, we reach a shelf overlooking a saddle in the pass, and Callahan calls it. “This is it.”

Wilder’s already moving, scanning for the position that gives him the widest field with the least exposure, and he settles behind a jumble of rocks that took him four seconds to identify as the best cover on the whole shelf. Liu and Sykes start setting perimeter, and I help Callahan clear a spot for the sleeping bags, tucked back under an overhang where the wind can’t reach, and the rock face breaks up our heat signature.

“Two-hour watch rotations,” Callahan says. “I’ll take the first. You and Wilder, second. Sykes and Liu, third.”

“Copy.”

Nights creep up on you in these mountains. Sometimes it feels like someone cutting the power on a timer. I eat a cold ration, half-listening to Sykes and Liu whisper about whether the stars look different this far east, and when my two hours of rest are up and Callahan’s boot connects gently with my sleeping bag, I roll out and take my post beside Wilder without a word passing between us that isn’t necessary.

The watch is quiet. The pass below sits empty, moonlight silver on the rocks, and I spend most of my two hours doing the thing I told myself I wouldn’t do—thinking about a narrow bunk a full day’s march away, and the man in it, sleeping alone tonight for the first time in over a week.

I got used to that fast. Too fast. Used to his heartbeat under my ear, his hand in mine, his low and rough voice telling me to stay. Out here, with nothing but rock and Wilder’s silent presence three feet away, I feel his absence even stronger.

When my watch ends, I crawl back into the sleeping bag, and it feels smaller than it ever has, even though it’s been the same my whole career. I fall asleep anyway, because a soldier who can’t fall asleep on command is a soldier who gets someone killed.

It’s past midnight when the first round comes, close enough to kick rock dust into my mouth before I’m even fully awake.

“Contact!” Callahan’s voice, already up and moving. “Stand to, stand to!”

I’m out of the bag and behind the nearest boulder before my brain finishes processing the sound, rifle up, goggles down, the world turning green. Muzzle flashes bloom from three directions at once—the saddle below, the ridgeline above, a jumble of rocks to our east that we thought weren’t climbable without ropes.

“They’re on the high ground!” Wilder shouts, already firing, his rounds cracking out at a rhythm too steady to be panic. “East side, above the shelf!”

“Liu, Sykes, cover the saddle!” Callahan’s voice cuts through the chaos, flat and hard. “Reyes, with me! We push the east flank before they get plunging fire on the whole position!”

I move with him, staying low, and the rocks around us start chipping apart under fire that’s coming from too many angles for five men to answer. It’s different than the ambush at the cache. We had direction then. Here, we’re completely surrounded. The shots just keep coming, wave after wave of muzzle flashes from positions that seem to multiply every time I blink.

“How many?” I shout at Callahan as we drop behind a slab.

“Too many,” he shouts back. That’s not an answer designed to make me feel better.

We trade fire with the east flank for what feels like ten minutes and turns out, when I check my watch, to be closer to forty. Every time we push them back a few meters, they reposition and open from someplace new. This is discipline. This is a unit that planned for exactly this kind of resistance and brought enough bodies to absorb it.

Sykes goes down behind us with a cry that turns my blood to ice.

“Sykes is hit!” Liu’s voice a moment later. “Leg, it’s bad, I need hands!”

Callahan doesn’t hesitate. “Reyes, hold this flank. I’ve got Sykes.”

He’s gone before I can argue, and suddenly it’s just me on the east side of the shelf, with rounds coming closer and closer. So I do the only thing that’s ever worked for me in a moment like this. I stop being scared and start being efficient.

Breathe. Find the flash. Fire. Breathe. Find the next one.