There’s another buzzsaw echo, another staccato burst of exchanged automatic fire—it’s hard to tell which direction anything is coming from, echoing off the hillsides. Duke occasionally pauses, checks a compass dangling from a braided loop of paracord clipped to his vest; he checks it any time we have to go around a downed tree or cluster of boulders.
There’s a burst of gunfire again—close. Loud. Something snicks through the trees overhead, and Duke holds up his closed fist, and then flattens his hand palm down, pressing his hand downward:Halt, get down.
I drop to a knee, snugging my carbine to my shoulder and checking the charging handle, the load, set it to burst, readying it for combat.
Duke turns, catches Thresh’s eye, and there’s a quick exchange of sign language between them. Thresh nods, and the two creep forward. Duke pauses to motion for the rest of us to stay where we are, pointing to his eyes and then a scanning motion.
A moment later, Duke and Thresh vanish around a bend and over a hill—there’s a sudden racket, a flurry of burst-fire, a more frenzied return indicating a lack of trigger discipline. Abruptly, the gunfire stops, and Duke and Thresh return a moment later, waving for us to join them.
We reach a flat area, where the hillside evens off in a plateau, and here the trees also fade into a decent-sized clearing. We pause, crouched, Duke watching. It’s silent, suddenly. The rotor thumping is distant. No gunfire. I’m sweating—it trickles down my spine, smears on my lip and the back of my neck, slides tickling down between my breasts. I’m thirsty. I haven’t seen anything but trees, yet I’m terrified.
Duke and Thresh again communicate in sign language, coming to some sort of agreement. The fireteams—Duke, me, and four nameless soldiers, and Thresh, Apollo, Thomas, and three others—split up and go around the clearing in both directions. We skirt wide around the clearing and approach the far side at an oblique angle. I’m behind Duke, the other men behind me, single file.
Something hot bites my cheek, and at the same moment, gunfire explodes to our right. I drop to my belly, rifle at the ready. Duke is firing, but I can’t see what to aim at so I hold—my breath and my fire. Then I see something move a dozen yards through the trees, something not forest, the wrong color, the wrong shape. I draw bead on it, wait.Be sure of your target—I hear Sasha’s voice in my head. There’s a flash of muzzle burst from the shape, and an eye blink after the muzzle-flash, I squeeze my trigger for a three-round burst, the butt kicking hard, the noise deafening. My ears ring. I scan visually, but see nothing—wait, another smear of movement, higher up. I’m more sure of my target now, so I fire immediately. This time, I see my target lurch, topple. It’s not even a human, just a smear of movement and burst of muzzle flash. My mind settles, the fear recedes. Duke shifts from one knee to a crouch and crab walks sideways behind a tree; there’s another tree a few yards from my position, a thick pine—I scramble for it, flatten myself behind it. Duke catches my eye, motions for me to wait. Peers around the side of his tree—it’s silent, for a moment.
I feel a bead of sweat make a million-mile, million-year journey from the tip of my chin, over my throat, and down my chest. Each thud of my heart in my ears is spaced by an eternity; the thud of my heartbeat and the ring from gunfire is all I hear.
I watch Duke, wait for a command.
He stands upright, rolls out keeping the tree covering most of his body, fires two bursts in quick succession, drops to one knee, fires twice more. Exchanges his magazine without looking, his sense of proprioception telling him where the partially depleted mag goes, where the new one is. Fires again. Then he’s waving at me and jogging forward—I have to sprint to keep up, and god, am I not built for sprinting, especially not in all this gear. The vest bounces, the small sack with spare magazines on my back bounces, the HK bounces, the helmet bounces—my tits bounce, my ass bounces. It’s all I can feel, the fifty different things bouncing. I hear the men behind me, boots stomping, gear shuffling and thumping.
Duke halts with a controlled crash against a tree, sweating and huffing from the uphill run—where he’s merely huffing, I’m panting desperately, gagging.
A soldier halts beside me, puffing and sweating—he’s got a dark blond three-day shadow, startling blue eyes.
“Running…in…gear…sucks,” I gasp-whisper.
He hides a smirk. “Yes ma’am, it does.”
“Try doing it…as…a woman.” I suppress the urge to massage my aching chest. “I felt like my tits were going to bounce away without me.”
He scans me—it’s a professional scrutiny, no more. He does something to my helmet, and then tugs at the sides of my vest, the straps of my bag, clicks things together, ties other things off. “There. Your shit was loosey-goosey. Gotta keep it tight, ma’am.”
“Thanks.” I eye him. “What’s your name?”
“Murph, ma’am.”
“Hi, Murph. I’m Rin Roth.”
He nods. “I know, ma’am. I was part of the cleanup at the fort. What you did back there was some cold-ass Rambo shit.” His tone indicates that this is the highest respect he can give. “All of us who were there?” He indicates the other three men, close by, listening. “We’d follow you into hell itself, ma’am. That was truly badass.”
I don’t know what do with this statement. “I…um. Thanks?”
He just nods, then juts his chin at Duke—he and Thresh have been conferring again, indicating the terrain ahead and looking at compasses and folded maps and small handheld devices. I hadn’t realized we’d connected with the others. Murph’s direction of my attention to Duke was to indicate we were about to move out again.
I spy Apollo, winded like I am, sweating, bad arm slung tight against the armored vest he’s wearing; he’s carrying a pistol in hand, a new one with an extended magazine. He smiles at me but remains in position in Thresh’s shadow. It was understood when fireteams were assigned that as the least experienced and least trained members of the team, Apollo and I would be the shadows of our respective guardians, and that under no circumstances were we to alter this arrangement.
We’re moving again, hauling ass uphill once more, at a jog now instead of a sprint—Murph’s adjustments to my gear has done wonders; the only things bouncing now are the parts of me that are gonna bounce anyway, and that’s tolerable. The gear jostling out of time was what was throwing me off. We duck between trees and scramble over downed giants and under them, angling always in the same direction up the mountainside. There’s occasional gunfire in what sounds like half a dozen different directions, sporadic and shifting and echoing.
Sweat burns in my eyes, and my muscles ache. My legs are on fire. Everything hurts. I’m not in the kind of peak physical conditioning required to make easy work of this—and even the hardened soldiers like Murph are panting and sweating.
Abruptly, we come to a halt at a clearing—over Duke’s shoulder, the terrain falls away in a steep hillside. I edge closer to Duke, and realize we’ve closed in on our target.
“Ho…leeeeee….shit,” I hear Murph mutter beside me. “We’re assaultingthat?”
My heart drops out of my chest.
The stronghold is built in the side of a cliff-face, approachable from two directions only. Above, solid mountain stone outcropping. Below, a precipitous drop. The mountain rolls away to either side, but the actual approaches are going to be well-covered.
