Page 111 of Duty Preserved

“Once Jace gets me a location, then we can start moving and come up with a plan on the way.”

“How many are we taking?”

“Two.”

Andrew looked at me. “Two.”

“You and me.”

“Donovan—”

“I’m not taking the rangers.”

The words came out sharper than I intended. Andrew studied my face. He knew why.

He knew about Owen. I’d told him on a late night during a job in Kurdistan. He knew exactly what I was looking at when I looked at Zayn and Baraka and Jomo.

“They’re not ready for this,” I said. “A hostage rescue against an armed crew in a fixed position. I can’t risk that many lives.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I just can’t take that risk.”

Andrew was quiet. His thumb moved along the edge of his rifle sling, but the rest of him was still.

“Okay,” Andrew said. “Then it’s you and me.”

“I’m not asking you to come.”

“I know you’re not.” He unslung his rifle and seated a fully loaded magazine. “Sergeant York, 1918. One man took out a line of machine gun nests and captured 132 soldiers. When they asked him how he did it, he said he picked them off from the back so the ones in the front didn’t know what was happening.” He slapped the magazine home. “So I suppose any threat under 270 enemy combatants should be reasonable for the two of us to handle.”

My phone buzzed. Jace.

“General footprint,” he said. “The call routed through two Iridium birds. The first one was dropping below the horizon during the call, so the network handed off to a second. The beam overlap between the two narrows it to a stretch of farmland south of the reserve boundary. Maybe a fifteen-kilometer radius from the southern access road. Cross-referencing with satellite imagery, there are a handful of structures in that area. Rented farmsteads, livestock outbuildings.”

“Can you narrow it further?”

“Not from the signal alone. But you know what Nasser needs. A building with road access, cover from aerial observation, and enough space for vehicles. That eliminates most of the footprint. I’m looking at three, maybe four possible locations. The closest is eight kilometers past the reserve’s southern boundary on a dirt track off the main road.”

“Send me the coordinates.”

“Already done. Donovan.” He paused. “You guys be careful. Bring her back.”

“Will do.” I ended the call. Andrew had heard enough.

We were already in the right room. Rifles, load-bearing vests to hold extra magazines, individual medical kits, and some tools for mechanical breaching. We each made sure to top off on water as well. We loaded what we needed and nothing we didn’t.

The ranger bunkhouse was quiet. All of them asleep or trying to be, worn down from the firefight and the adrenaline crash that followed it.

I stood in the compound and looked at that building for longer than I should have. These men had fired back last night. They’d held positions and followed orders under live contact and driven an armed crew off their reserve. Four days ago, they couldn’t have done any of it. They’d earned the right to be part of what came next.

And I was walking past them because I couldn’t risk being wrong again.

We took the truck from the vehicle bay. Andrew drove. I rode with my rifle barrel-down between my knees and the coordinates glowing on my phone between us. We pulled out of camp on the southern access road. Andrew drove fast and didn’t talk.

Neither of us spoke. Somewhere ahead of us, Sarah was in the hands of a man who had hit her at least once already and promised worse.

The farmstead sat at the end of a dirt track that branched off the main road and dead-ended at a wire fence.