Chapter 5: Bravo

At 0534, a second force opened up on the base from the south.

Kirsti had been so fixed on the Molar that she didn’t see it coming until she heard the rocket launch—a hollow woof followed by the shriek of the projectile—and she whipped her glass off the ridge in time to see a streak of smoke rising from the abandoned village across the dry riverbed. The village that had been empty for two years. The village nobody had bothered to clear because it was empty.

It had not been empty.

The rocket hit the south corner of the base, right where the big fifty-caliber was. A flash. A black cloud. A silence where the fifty-cal had been a second before.

“Command—second force, south village. They have indirect weapons. The fifty-cal position is hit. I say again, the fifty-cal position is hit.”

“Sector Four, stand by. Kowalski is coming up.”

“Sir, I don’t have time to stand by. If there’s a second rocket team in that village, I need to kill it in the next thirty seconds or they’ll walk rounds down our spine.”

A pause—too long. Then a voice she didn’t expect. Kowalski, cutting in on the command net personally.

“Private First Class Duncan. You are cleared hot on any target, any sector, any direction. You shoot what you see. I’m authorizing you on my rank and my name. Copy?”

“Copy.”

She swung her rifle toward the south wall. The slit window covered a fifty-degree arc, and the southern village fell inside it. She scanned one building at a time—mud brick, collapsed roof, mud brick, collapsed roof, mud brick with a dark rectangle in the front, and inside the rectangle, a flicker. A man reloading a tube.

She put him down. Scanned to the next building. Another dark rectangle. Another flicker. She put that man down too.

The third building had no rocket team. It had a spotter with binoculars—an older man, maybe forty, calm and professional, the kind of man who had been fighting this war since Kirsti was in grade school. He was looking straight at her hut. He had figured out where her fire was coming from. He was calling it in.

Kirsti looked at him through her glass. He looked back through his binoculars, though he didn’t know he was looking at her. For one long second, they were the only two people in the valley who understood what this had become.

She put him down.

At 0537, the assault broke.

Not all at once—in pieces, like a wave pulling back off rock. The technicals on the ridge stopped cresting. The men in the south village stopped moving. Somewhere behind the Molar, an engine turned over and drove away. Somewhere in the village, a door banged—and then nothing.

The silence that fell on Forward Operating Base Vanguard was the loudest silence Kirsti had ever heard.

She did not move her rifle off the south village. She had been in this long enough—in training, in simulations, in every book she had ever read about men who did this work—to know that silence after an assault is not peace. Silence after an assault is the enemy catching his breath.

Captain Kowalski stepped into her hut alone and closed the door behind him.

“Duncan.”

“Sir.”

“Take your eye off the glass for ten seconds. That’s an order.”

She hesitated. Then she obeyed. Kowalski’s face was covered in dust. There was a smear of blood across his left cheek—not his—and a tear in his sleeve. He looked at her for a long moment.