Chapter 4

DIGGING IN — 0715

The gunfire had stopped almost entirely now—a few scattered rounds, testing, the kind of fire that came from positions checking whether anything moved rather than positions trying to hit something. Gabriella stayed pressed against the wall, both hands on Broderick’s head wound, and made herself wait through three full minutes of near-silence before she let herself believe it might hold.

Broderick’s breathing had gone shallow but steady. The bleeding had slowed under the pressure of her hands, though not stopped—scalp wounds bled like this, dramatically, more blood than the injury usually warranted, and she couldn’t yet tell if that was good news or if it was hiding something worse underneath.

She needed supplies. She needed ammunition. And both of those things were inside a Humvee that anyone still watching this street would still be watching.

First things first.

She checked Broderick one more time—pulse weak but there, breathing steady, no change in the blown pupil—and eased his head down against the folded jacket she’d wedged beneath it, and then she was moving, low and fast, back across the four feet of open ground between the wall and the Humvee’s blown-out door.

Nothing fired at her. She got inside the shadow of the wreck and stayed there a moment, back against the crumpled metal, listening. Somewhere off to the south, small arms fire—distant, unrelated to them. Nothing close. Nothing aimed this way.

She went to work.

Ainsley was where she’d left him, slumped over the wheel, and she made herself not look at him longer than necessary because there was nothing here that needed her, and everything else did. His vest first—she found the magazine pouches by feel, working fast, fingers finding each pouch and pulling it open. Three mags, all full, twenty rounds each. She stacked them against her body and moved to the ammo chest, which had sprung open in the blast, lid hanging at an angle, contents shifted but mostly intact.

She counted as she pulled them out. Two more full mags—the ones she’d spotted earlier. She checked each one by feel, pressing the top round with her thumb, confirming the weight, the spring tension. Full. Both of them.

She stopped there. Five loose mags total, plus the ones already seated in Broderick’s M4 and her own. Seven mags. One hundred and forty rounds. She did the math twice, because math done once under these conditions wasn’t math you could trust, and came up with the same number both times.

Then she revised it downward.

Twenty rounds already gone—burned when Cortez went down, when she’d come up over the wall firing without thinking about it, without counting, just firing because someone had to and there was nobody else left to do it. One mag, essentially. Gone.