One Breath at a Time
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 3
THE AMBUSH — 0658
The bend in the road came and went, and for three or four seconds afterward, nothing happened. The street on the other side looked exactly like the street they’d been driving down—shuttered storefronts, dust, a parked car with two flat tires—and Gabriella felt the held breath in the Humvee start to ease, felt Cortez’s shoulders drop half an inch, felt Ainsley’s foot come off the brake just slightly as the street ahead read as clear.
Then the RPG came in from the right, low, and hit the front of the Humvee dead center.
The blast threw the front end up and sideways, and the windshield came apart into the cab as a sheet of cracked glass and twisted frame, and Gabriella was thrown forward against her seatbelt hard enough that for a moment there was nothing but the belt cutting into her shoulder and the high flat tone that meant her ears had given up trying to keep up.
“CONTACT—” Gallagher’s voice, from the turret, cut off mid-word by the chatter of automatic fire that seemed to come from everywhere at once—both sides of the street now, upper windows, doorways, positions that hadn’t existed thirty seconds ago and now seemed to be everywhere.
The Humvee wasn’t moving. Gabriella understood that before she understood much else—the engine note had changed, gone from a growl to a cough to nothing, and the front of the vehicle sat low and wrong, crumpled into the street, blocking it completely. Behind them, she could hear Delacroix’s Humvee—brakes, shouting, the second vehicle’s gunner already firing.
“Ainsley—” Cortez, twisting in his seat, and Gabriella followed his eyes and saw what he saw: Ainsley slumped forward over the wheel, not moving, a dark stain spreading across the back of his uniform from a wound she couldn’t see the source of and didn’t need to.
Above them, Gallagher’s fifty-cal had gone silent.
“Gallagher!” Cortez was already twisting around, trying to see up into the turret, and Gabriella saw his face change—saw the moment his training and his fear arrived at the same conclusion at the same time—and she didn’t need him to say it.
“Lieutenant—” She turned to Broderick, and found him slumped against the shattered door, blood running from a gash along his hairline where the windshield had come apart, his eyes open but wrong, unfocused, his hands moving uselessly against his seatbelt buckle like he couldn’t remember what they were for.
Outside, the gunfire wasn’t slackening. If anything it was getting worse—Gabriella could hear rounds striking the Humvee’s armor in a rhythm that had nothing random about it anymore, that sounded like positions adjusting, like people who’d found their range and were settling into it.
“We can’t stay in the vehicle.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “Cortez—help me with the lieutenant. We need to get him out, now.”
“Doc, Gallagher’s not answering—”
“I know. I know. We can’t help him from here.” It came out flatter than she meant it to, and she didn’t have time to soften it. “Broderick first. Then we figure out the rest.”
Cortez’s jaw worked, and for a half-second she thought he might argue—might go for the turret, might do something that would get him killed for no reason—and then training won, the way it was built to, and he turned and got his hands under Broderick’s other arm.
Getting him out the side door was easier than the hatch had been in her imagination of how this might go—the door on Broderick’s side had been blown half off its hinges by the RPG, hanging at an angle that left a gap wide enough for a man to be dragged through, which was exactly what they did, Cortez taking most of the weight, Gabriella guiding Broderick’s head and shoulders, both of them moving in the half-crouch that kept them below the windows even as rounds continued to strike the vehicle’s far side.
The street outside was chaos rendered in fragments—muzzle flashes from windows on both sides, Delacroix’s Humvee twenty meters back with its gunner firing in long bursts, dust kicking up everywhere rounds struck pavement instead of metal or flesh. Twelve feet away, a low wall ran along the front of what had once been a shop—maybe waist-high, concrete, enough to put something solid between a body and the street.
“There,” Gabriella said, and didn’t wait for agreement.
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