I held the wheel.
Chapter Nineteen
~ Sterling ~
The radio call came at 10:42.
I was at the long table in the bunkhouse kitchen with a mug of coffee that had gone cold two hours ago and a list of names I’d been staring at for the better part of the morning.
Cruz sat across from me, his dark eyes on the window, saying exactly nothing, which from Cruz meant he was thinking hard and didn’t want to share. The wood stove ticked behind me. Patient. Counting seconds the way it counted everything.
Then Caleb’s voice came through the frequency. One word. “Moving.”
The word landed in the bunkhouse kitchen like something with physical weight. Caleb’s voice was steady—Caleb’s voice was always steady—but underneath it was a current I’d never heard from him before. Raw. Controlled, but barely.
And Mitch said nothing.
I was already moving before the word finished. Chair back, rifle off the wall rack, boots on gravel, and my hands were doing something they had never done in twenty years of operations across nineteen continents.
They were not steady.
I gripped the rifle stock and felt it. My fingers weren’t flush. My knuckles weren’t locked. The weapon sat in my hands the way it always sat, and my hands were not holding it the way they always held it.
This had never happened. Not Caracas, not Tbilisi, not the night in Ramadi when the roof came down and I carried two men out through smoke so thick I couldn’t see my own boots.
My hands are steady in firefights. They are steady in surgery. They are steady when the world is ending and there is nothing left to hold onto except the thing in my hands.
They were not steady now.
Caleb had said one word. Mitch had said nothing at all, and the silence where Mitch should be was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
Cruz was already at the Humvee. Two hands from the north pasture jogged across the yard at the look I gave them—not a command, not a request, just the look—and they piled into the back without questions because my face at 10:42 on a Tuesday morning did not invite questions.
I slid into the passenger seat. Rifle across my knees, barrel down, safety off because I wasn’t fucking around. My hands were still wrong. I curled my fingers tighter and pretended I didn’t notice.
Cruz turned the key. The engine caught. The Humvee lurched forward before the transmission had fully engaged, gravel spitting under the tires, and we were on the main road before the bunkhouse was out of sight.
“Faster,” I said.
“I heard you the first time.” Cruz’s voice was flat. His eyes were on the road. His hands on the wheel were exactly what my hands should have been: locked, certain, moving the vehicle at a speed that defied several traffic laws and one basic principle of physics.
“Then act like it.”
“I am acting like it. You’re watching the speedometer instead of the road.”
I looked at the road. The county highway was laid out ahead of us, gray and pocked and objectively terrible, and Cruz was pushing the Humvee through it at a pace that made the suspension howl.
He said, without inflection, “They’re going to be fine.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were about to.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The eastern ridge came into view ahead of us, dark against the thin Montana sky, and the scanner on the dash picked up two vehicles running hard on the ridge road. Mitch’s truck. Second vehicle behind it, closing.
I did the distance math in my head. Ridge curve. Drop-off. Two hundred feet of lodge pole pine and nobody finding the wreckage for days.
I didn’t like the answer.
