Chapter 1

"Taylor! Get your ass up. We're Oscar Mike," Sergeant Alvarez said.

"Yes, Master Sergeant," I said, sliding off the hood of the vehicle I was lying on and looking around, blinking.

I had pulled the boonie cap off my face when I got up, and was practically blinded by the sun. It was bright as hell.

It was also hot. Of course, it was the desert, in the middle of summer, and I had been lying on the hood of a metal Humvee for almost an hour; so, 'hot' was kind of a given. Even with my sunglasses on and my eyes closed, it felt like I could still see the sun, blaring down on me.

Everyone was starting to mount up. I headed to the second of my team's three Humvees, and slid in behind Malcolm Reeves, one of our two 18Cs specializing in engineering and demolitions.

In Army Special Forces there are five specialties that team members focus on, plus our field command team. I was one of the two weapons sergeants, also known as 18Bs. Besides knowing how to operate a wide range of weapons, both from the US and from allied and foreign nationalities, we were trained in the maintenance and repair of weapons as well. We also helped out maintaining vehicles, and assisting guys like Reeves, since there was some crossover in mechanical ability between the two specialties. Besides Reeves, our Humvee also carried our team Sergeant, who had just yelled at me to get moving, and one of our medics.

It took a few minutes for the guys in the trucks ahead of us to start up and pull out. There were about fifteen vehicles in total, counting our three Humvees in the center, and one Humvee at the front and one at the rear of the convoy. The remaining vehicles were the ubiquitous two and a half ton trucks that carried all of the military supplies.

The convoy we had been waiting on to form up, all morning, finally looked about ready to go. It had been decided, higher up the food chain, that it would be best to hold our Operational Detachment Alpha, also called an ODA, and have us travel with a supply convoy back to Camp Blessing, the Forward Operating Base in the Pech district.

I guess I could see their reasoning. The Taliban had made huge inroads in the region, pouring back in from Pakistan. The roads back, and the area itself, were dangerous with numerous ambushes and IED attacks on our convoys in the last several months. Knowing all this didn't really help with my impatience, however. After Camp Blessing, we were set to rotate back to Bagram Airbase for some down time. It was something to look forward to, after almost a month of working in 'the valley'.

We had come out for a hearts and minds mission, to work with some local village leaders, with the hope that we could cut off some of the growing Taliban influence. It hadn't gone particularly well. Half of the villages were hostile, and wanted nothing to do with us. The rest of the villages we contacted were terrified of reprisals from Taliban forces as soon as we were out of sight.

Sadly, that was all too frequent an occurrence. We usually had to pull back to a secure base at night, for security reasons, while the Taliban lived among these people twenty-four seven.

So, we were headed back with little to show for our effort. It sounds bad, but it didn't really bother me one way or the other. It was just another day on the job. That sounds callous, but that's the way things were. Captain Evers, however, was annoyed. This was his last rotation, and from what I had heard he wasn't looking to re-up. He had spent a lot of years in the Army, and he wanted something to cap off his career. Helping push the Taliban out of the Pech valley would have done just that. But, you win some, you lose some.

The trucks themselves were empty or lightly loaded for the most part. They had rolled into the camp early in the morning dropping off food, bottled water and ammo for the combat outpost. While there were only about fifty Americans and a hundred Afghan soldiers stationed at the base at any given time to support and supply patrols and missions into the valley, the Army kept these supply runs irregular, but large enough to keep the camp going for a month. The hope was it would keep the insurgents from guessing a pattern in our shipments or getting too many bites at the apple.

The return trip was always the more dangerous leg of the journey, however. It was a certainty that the Taliban had people watching the roads, and knew that a convoy was coming in. They probably had people watching the base as well from one of the higher mountains. That was the issue with mountain operations. It was next to impossible to maintain the high ground and even more difficult to hide your activity from the enemy.

But, it wasn't like we could stay there all day.

We pulled out of the small walled compound in a column that stretched almost half a mile. While there weren't a lot of vehicles, we kept a loose formation. Mostly to limit the effectiveness of IEDs, which were the go-to for insurgents in the region. The downside of this formation is that it is possible to cut off parts of the column with a concentrated ambush. Since either was a possibility, all we could do was choose one and hope for the best.

Even spread out like we were, the dust kicked up by the trucks on these dry mountain roads was horrendous. Visibility ahead of us was down to about fifteen feet and we had to keep our speeds fairly low to keep from dropping off the side of a cliff that we couldn't see. You could see out the sides pretty well, and since we were on a cliff we kept most of our mounted weapons focused out to the right, not that we would see much in the case of an ambush. Unless they are moving a lot, it's hard to pick out gunmen from the small shrubs and large rocks that littered the hillsides.

"Sarge, Claire sent me an email this morning. She said you never RSVP'd for the wedding," I hollered up to Alvarez.

Claire was my fiancée back home. We met five years before, when I was signing up for a semester of school at the University of North Carolina. I had already been in the military for eight years by that point, and was taking distance learning classes to earn a Criminal Justice degree. It seemed a waste to let my GI Bill money go to waste; and besides, the military was hard on the body. I couldn't do it for the rest of my life and needed a fall back plan.

She was just starting a doctorate of pharmacology. Most of the people who we knew found us to be an odd pair. Here I was, twenty-eight years old, at the time we met, and active duty military, with big dreams of becoming a local cop somewhere when I got out, and she was simply brilliant. She had rocketed through her undergrad degree in three years, and had been accepted into a very competitive program at UNC. There was also the age difference. She was turning twenty-one, and just starting her life.

But, we hit it off instantly. It was like those loves stories you read about in fairy tales. Love at first sight, or at least strong attraction. I've never been accused of being all warm and friendly and was generally pretty stand-offish with most people, but I asked her out right there in the registrar's office.

Our early romance was a whirlwind.

I had been on loan from the 10th Special Forces Command, to the Special Warfare Center, to act as an instructor and trainer at Fort Bragg. This was my first stable posting, with all my previous deployments bouncing me between the US and bases in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. I had decided to take advantage of the situation, and at least get school started. This was a common degree program for serving military, and there was a system in place to allow for distance education that was tailored to our ... nomadic lifestyle.

What that also meant, was for the first time in my adult life I had enough stability to actually build a relationship. Driving up to Chapel Hill every weekend I had off, and any other chance I could manufacture, to visit her. She took any breaks she had from school, and stayed in a motel in the tiny town of Spring Lake, which was located just outside the base.

It was an amazing seven months. But a training slot only lasts so long. They don't want us to get rusty, and they want to keep people with fresh experience rotating through. We were also deep in the war in Iraq, and they were doing a large increase in the number of troops, in country. They called it 'The Surge'. The Army pulled me out of the Special Warfare Center and assigned me to a new team in the field.

"Is that still on?" Reeves asked.

"We worked things out on my last leave," I told him.

When my orders came down sending me back into the field, I had thought for sure that would be the end of the relationship, but she said she wanted to give long distance a try. So we emailed and called, as often as possible. She sent letters and packages. Things were heating up, operationally, so there weren't a lot of chances to come back.

It got tough for a while, especially just before my last leave. Up to then, she had been working hard on her doctorate and was pretty busy on her own, which helped. But as time passed, and we continued the long distance thing, she had started becoming more dissatisfied with the arrangement. Honestly, I was surprised we had made it work with so little problems that long. Well, really, she made it work.

On my last leave, I asked her to marry me, figuring if I was going to keep her, which was very much the plan, I needed to step up my game.