Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6
Anbar Province, Iraq, August 2010
She was field stripping the Mk 22 when Gunny Holloway came through the door of the ready room and told her the Colonel wanted to see her.
She set the bolt down and followed him without asking why.
Colonel Richard Mast commanded the battalion she was currently attached to and moved the way long-serving Marines moved — everything unnecessary stripped away years ago. He was standing behind his desk when she came in and he didn’t tell her to sit.
“You’re being transferred,” he said.
She waited.
“SEAL Team Three has requested you by name. The request came through SOCOM and I don’t have the authority to deny it even if I wanted to.” He looked at her steadily. “Which I do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You understand what that means. You won’t be Marine attached anymore. You’ll be working for them, on their timeline, their missions, their rules of engagement.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Their operational tempo makes what we do here look leisurely.”
“Understood, sir.”
He studied her for a moment with the expression of a man trying to find something underneath the surface and not getting there.
“Sand Viper,” he said. Not a question. Just the call sign sitting in the air between them.
“Yes, sir.”
“Fourteen confirmed in fourteen minutes in the Jazirah.” He paused. “Barrel swap mid-engagement.”
“The barrel was hot, sir.”
Something moved across his face that wasn’t quite a smile. “I know why you swapped it. The report went up the chain and apparently kept going. You have admirers in places I don’t have clearance for.”
She said nothing.
“Pack your gear,” he said. “You report to Kandahar Airfield in seventy-two hours. Someone will meet you there.” He picked up a folder from his desk. “Good hunting, Sergeant.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She was at the door when he spoke again.
“Park.”
She turned.
“Take care of yourself over there.” He said it without ornament, without sentiment, just the words carrying exactly what they carried. “Those boys run hard.”
“Yes, sir.”
She packed in forty minutes.
Everything she owned fit into two bags and a weapons case and she’d packed and unpacked them enough times that the process required no thought. Gear first, personal second, weapons last. She sat on the edge of her bunk when it was done and looked at the room — bare walls, bare floor, the smell of gun oil and dust that was the smell of every place she’d slept in the last two years — and felt nothing she’d call sentiment about leaving it.
She’d never felt sentiment about leaving anywhere.
She thought about calling her parents. Decided against it. Her mother would ask where she was going and she wouldn’t be able to say and the silence around that would cost them both something neither of them could afford right now.
She picked up her bags and walked out.
The transport to Kandahar Airfield left at 0400 and she slept three hours in a canvas seat with her weapons case between her feet and woke when the wheels touched down and looked out the window at Afghanistan for the first time.
Brown. Rock. Mountains in the distance the color of old bone.
Different country. Same war.
She picked up her bags and walked off the plane into the Afghan heat and stopped at the bottom of the ramp and looked at the man waiting for her on the tarmac.
He was leaning against a HUMVEE with his arms crossed and a metal cup of coffee in one hand and the look of someone who had been awake for two days and had made his peace with it. Medium height. Lean. A face that had started out one thing and been rearranged by years and weather into something harder to read.
He looked at her the way she looked at a new position — taking in the ground before committing to anything.
“Park Min-Ji,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Paterson.” He uncrossed his arms and held out the coffee cup. “You want this?”
She took it. Drank. It was terrible and she didn’t say so.
“How was Anbar?”
“Productive, sir.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “I’ll bet.” He pushed off the HUMVEE. “Walk with me.”
He talked while they walked and she listened the way she always listened — completely, filing everything, the words and the spaces between them.
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