Chapter 1

My nightmare always started the same way. The warning cry from Cholo was mixed up with the flash of light from my right. A thousand nights, a thousand nightmares, and I still couldn't tell you, which came first.

Cholo was Sgt. Rafael Gutierrez, and those were the last words he ever spoke. He'd been with my team for three weeks, arriving just as we deployed, and had integrated into the team seamlessly. It had felt as if he'd been by our sides for years.

We were a Ranger LRS team, long range surveillance. Our job was to search out enemy positions, to find out where they were, what they were planning and get that info back to our guys at camp. We trained in stealth, in being inserted into almost any terrain, in spotting, recognizing and analyzing enemy strengths, weaknesses and disposition.

The data we gathered was used by the planners to map out operations for the troops, and it was a vital job. We considered ourselves the best at what we did, and with more than two hundred missions completed in the last three years, our records supported that claim.

There were five men in our team. Lieutenant Charles (LT) Evers was our nominal team leader, though he was smart enough to listen closely when we gave him 'advice'. I'm Doug (Big Dog) Ramos, and I was a Staff Sergeant at the time, second in command. I liked to say that I had more missions under my belt than the LT had lunches in the Army. There was also Sergeant Rafael (Cholo) Gutierrez, our comm. man, Sergeant Maxwell (Max) Taylor, our heavy weapons man and Corporal Alan (Sparky) Dale, our geek.

The plan was to insert us into the Arghandab River Valley between Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. Our objective was to see if we could find a small complex that was rumored to be in the area, one that housed a prolific bomb maker named Mahmud Al Zaranj. We had a general location, within a couple of miles, but no specific grid coordinates. We were given a five-day window before extraction, and we wanted to make the most of that time.

We were inserted on a modified UH-60 Blackhawk, accompanied by a pair of AH-64E Apache attack birds, and fast-roped to a small LZ in what the planners called a 'Bump and Go'. The helicopters would make multiples stops, each one identical in length, where the Blackhawk would descend to ground level while the attack birds flew cover. They would stop two or three times, at two or three different locations, before we actually dropped, and another couple of times afterwards. The idea was that if someone was watching, there was no way for them to be sure which stop was the real one and which ones were fake. Supposedly, that same trick worked in Viet Nam, when we were making incursions into Cambodia, and it had been revived for covert insertions in the sand box.

There is an old saying in the military. "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." We try to plan for contingencies, for emergencies, and even for total fuck ups, but we have to guess at what the enemy's reactions will be. If they do something unexpected, the whole plan shifts to dealing with the new factors.

This was one hell of a new factor.

The first three bump and go stops went off like clockwork, and we were feeling confident. We were ready to drop and were already on the skids when the Blackhawk made its fast approach to the real LZ, and we were sliding down the lines before it had even come to a stop.

Exactly by the book.

I wouldn't find out until months later what went wrong, that the Afghani nationals who were hired for menial labor at the base were feeding info to the insurgents. All I knew was that seconds after my boots hit the ground, all hell broke loose.

JJ was coming over this morning to do some fine tuning on the hallway cams; a broken sprinkler system pipe had leaked into the ceiling and caused a short on number two. Since the cams out in the corridor were fixed, it gave him a huge blank spot in his surveillance, and an itch between his shoulder blades.

He was having an absolute blast playing with the new cameras on the balcony in the meantime; the zoom and pan functions were outstanding! The price had been enough to give him heartburn, but having a 10X optical zoom was already paying dividends. That smoking hot blonde on the second floor across the street had no idea that his camera angle gave him a perfect shot into her bathroom window.

With all eight of the high definition, optical zoom cameras on the wrap-around balcony of his corner apartment, all with the latest infrared night capabilities, he had a full two hundred and seventy degree coverage, horizontally, of the fronts of his building that faced the streets, with about ninety degrees vertical as well. Two of the cams were rotated so that he had one eighty vertical and ninety horizontal, so he could even watch the sky and the street-level entrances to the building.

In addition to his personal surveillance toys, he had an even dozen cameras around the exterior of the building that were for general building security, cameras that he used in his capacity as the owner of the building. The apartment building was a modest three floors, plus two studio apartments in the basement, and he lived in the grandiosely named 'Penthouse A' which took up half of the top floor. JJ and Christine, his sister, had 'Penthouse B'.

The rest of the tenants, six apartments per floor, were all professionals and, for the most part, low maintenance. One of the basement studio apartments was occupied by Joey, the building super and the other belonged to JJ's nephew Devon, who was working his way through college. He worked with the Parks Department during the day and went to school at night.

JJ was Jeanette James, and she was married to his sister. He still had that moment of cognitive dissonance every time he recalled that they were actually married, gay marriage still being so new here in Miami. JJ had grown up in this very building, and he'd played with her, gone to school with her, his entire childhood. He secretly was in love/lust with JJ from the time he hit puberty, and she'd been one of his favorite fantasies when he was jerking it in his room late at night. When he finally got up the nerve to ask her out on a date, his sophomore year in high school and learned she'd been dating his own sister on the sly, she became his number one fantasy.

Still, they had remained friends, and she'd been his most faithful pen pal during his three tours overseas. It had been JJ who had convinced him that he still had a life worth living after he came home in pieces. Christine Ramos, his sister and JJ's lover, was three years older than him and for a better sister, no man could ask. When his mother and father died his senior year in high school, it was Christine who had watched over him until he graduated and shipped off to boot camp; and it was Christine, who had managed the estate so that he'd had something to come home to when the Army medically retired him.

Their parents had owned several apartment buildings and a dozen commercial locations, so their deaths while tragic and heart rending to the two children, were not as traumatic as they could have been. The children had been well provided for, and Christine had found she had the knack for money management. She'd eventually sold off all the properties except this one and opened her own brokerage firm. She'd invested half of the proceeds for her brother, and when Doug came home, he did so as a wealthy man. Monetarily anyway.

He'd come home from Afghanistan minus both of his legs, amputated high on his thighs, and minus his left arm, amputated close to the shoulder. He had a dozen pockmarks where shrapnel had entered his torso, and been surgically removed, and a larger surgical scar down the middle of his chest where they had cracked him open to fish the metal from his lungs. He also had a three inch high burn scar around the left side of his neck, traveling from his Adam's apple all the way around the back of his head, where flames from the explosion had access to skin above his armor but below his helmet. If he hadn't been looking the other way, he might have lost a lot more. Last and, frankly, least, his left ear drum had been shredded by the pressure wave of the explosion, and he was completely deaf on that side.