Page 99 of Keeping a Warrior

“Emergency aircraft inbound from KAF, ETA ten mikes.”

Devon clutched her weapon. Fighter jets were leaving Kandahar Airfield now and would reach them in approximately ten minutes.

Do we have ten minutes?

Another RPG exploded right over the top of them and pelted the truck with shrapnel, a strategy designed to take out the turret gunner...

“Check on him!” Matt yelled as Shane’s gun went silent. “Shane!”

Devon whirled around, her heart crowding into her throat at the sight of Shane’s legs gone limp.

“He’s hit,” she cried.

Matt’s jaw rippled. “Is he...?”

Blood cascaded down in a sudden, gory waterfall, drenching Shane’s pants, his boots. Devon heaved a silent sob. Was he hit in the neck?

“Our turret gunner is hit.” Matt’s voice sounded calm, but Devon could hear the note of anguish in it. “We don’t know how bad.”

“Roger that. Keep moving.”

Matt had no choice but to drive on. They couldn’t stop to render aid to one man and risk losing the entire convoy. Silent tears ran down Matt’s cheeks but he didn’t waver. They broke free of the ambush just as the scream of fighter jets sounded overhead.

“Viper Zero-Seven, you are cleared hot,” the captain said grimly.

The fighters’ powerful cannons raked the mountainside, sending dirt and rock—and insurgents—tumbling into the void.

At the first spot next to the road that was wide enough, Matt wrenched the wheel and screeched to a stop. The other Humvees circled around as SF guys poured out to form a perimeter. Their medic sprinted toward them and together with Matt got Shane out of the turret and laid him on the ground.

Devon gasped in horror. A piece of shrapnel had gone under the lip of Shane’s helmet and torn its way across his forehead, exposing his skull. The medic eased the huge flap of skin back into place and wrapped his entire head with blood-absorbing gauze.

“His pulse is steady, and strong,” he told Matt. “Breathing sounds good.”

“The blood—”

“Yeah, he’s lost a shit-ton of blood so we need to get him over to KAF now.”

Someone called for a medevac as the fighter jets continued to thunder overhead in a show of force.

“We’re bingo for fuel,” one of the pilots finally radioed. “Thanks for the party, guys.”

With a roar, they disappeared over the horizon, leaving an eerie silence, but it wasn’t quiet for long, the sound of rotor blades soon filling Devon’s ears. There was no place for the helo to land, so it went into a steady hover above them.

“They’re gonna send a PJ down with a litter,” the medic informed Matt and Devon. “They’ll winch him up and he’ll be back at KAF well within the golden hour.”

Rhys had explained to Devon once what the “golden hour” meant in trauma care—that window of time when patients had the best chance of survival. Devon glanced at her watch. It’d been about thirty minutes since Shane’s injury.

A thick wire was unspooled from the helicopter, a stretcher-like thing attached to it, along with a man wearing a full tactical kit. Once the litter touched earth, it was no more than a minute before Shane was packaged up in it and hoisted into the helo. Then the bird dipped its nose and raced toward the hospital.

“He’s going to be okay,” she whispered to Matt, whose jaw was clenched so hard Devon wondered if his teeth were cracking.

When it was time to mount up, Devon took the wheel, Matt slumped beside her.

The convoy limped into the outpost about an hour later, exhausted and battered. Devon swung out of the bloody Humvee and fell almost directly into Rhys’s arms.

She clung to him for a moment. “You know about Shane?”

Setting her down on her feet, Rhys took her by the shoulders. Devon had never seen him so pale. “I was listening to the whole goddamn thing in the TOC,” he ground out. “When the call came in about troops in contact...”