“Stay with me, Ollie,” Zane whispered, sliding his arms under his friend’s shoulder and pulling him up. It struck him then that he was desperately holding on to the last friend he had. The last member of a team he’d been sweating and bleeding with for years. “I’m getting you home. I promise.”
Somehow, Zane got both of them to their feet. Draping one of Oliver’s arms over his shoulder, he gripped the back of his friend’s belt. Oliver tried to help, shuffling like some kind of zombie as they headed toward base camp. They still had a long way to go.
“Help is coming,” Oliver gasped. “I got through to District Centre before it happened. They’re sending help.”
Zane nodded, hoping his friend was right. Because there were a lot of Taliban fighters between here and base camp. Those fighters would do everything they could to slow any vehicles moving this way.
Within minutes, Zane was breathing so hard from exertion he missed the insurgents creeping up behind them…until the shooting started. He spun, emptying his carbine in the general direction of the group of people trying to kill them. He had no idea if he hit anyone, but it made them duck. He would have had to let go of Ollie to reload the assault weapon, and he sure as hell wasn’t doing that. Dropping the carbine, he pulled the Sig Sauer from a holster on his right thigh.
He popped one round at the group of men starting to reassemble behind them, then took off running toward base camp, though with his injuries and Oliver’s dead weight, it was more of a shamble. But they moved. That was all that mattered.
Time became little more than a messy blur of stumbling, gasping for breath, and pain—interspersed with the occasional shots coming at them from the shadows. Zane fired back when he could, taking out a few of the bad guys, but mostly he tried to keep moving. He was carrying limited ammo for his 9 mm. When he ran out, he and Oliver were dead. The goal now wasn’t to wipe out the bad guys. It was to hold them off until help arrived.
A few minutes later, Oliver faltered. His friend was fading fast.
“Go,” Oliver rasped. “I’m slowing you down.”
“Shut up!” Zane snapped. “I’m not leaving you!”
Zane’s first magazine ran out when three men jumped out of a side street. He got the one holding the grenade launcher right before the slide locked back. The other two men ran away, probably not realizing they could have dropped Zane and Oliver without too much effort now that they were defenseless. Reloading the Sig with one hand was complicated. The regiment made them train for stuff like that, for situations like this. Still, practice was one thing. Reality was totally different.
He had fifteen rounds left. That’s all that stood between him and Oliver and certain death.
Zane was so focused on moving forward he barely saw the Taliban fighters slipping out of the darkness. The ground all around them flared with the sparks of ricocheting bullets, and Zane spun Oliver to the side, heading toward one of the buildings lining the street and trying to shield his friend with his body as much as possible.
It didn’t work.
Zane heard the whoosh of the rocket-propelled grenade coming their way a fraction of a second before it impacted the wall of the nearby building and exploded. They both went down, but Oliver took the brunt of the blast wave—and the frag.
Zane hit the ground so hard he thought it would kill him, but he wasn’t that lucky. He didn’t even pass out. He bounced and slid a few feet, then lay there, numb. Frag from the RPG had gotten him, too, and blood was leaking out of him at an alarming rate. The fact that he didn’t feel anything even closely resembling pain still worried him, but he couldn’t focus on that. Oliver needed him.
He crawled on his hands and knees to his friend’s side, stopping every so often to shoot at the insurgents coming at them.
Oliver was a mess, and Zane was sure he was dead. But when he rolled Oliver over, he was still breathing.
“Don’t let them take me alive,” his friend whispered, gray eyes locking desperately on his. “I’m not scared to die, but I don’t want to go out that way.”
Tears filled Zane’s eyes. He knew what Oliver was asking. The Taliban would have no problem torturing his friend, even if it was only for a few minutes before he died. But Zane wasn’t sure this was something he could do. He was supposed to save his friends…not kill them.
But as one bullet after another hit the ground near them, Zane realized he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Oliver closed his eyes and let out one last, shuddering breath.
Something inside Zane died then, the final piece of his soul withering away. Harry, Billy, and Oliver—men who’d depended on him to bring them home—were all gone.
How the hell does a person go on after this? Why would they bother?
Zane lifted his Sig out of pure instinct, squeezing the trigger and killing the four men charging him. He wasn’t sure why he did it. There had to be others roaming around. But shooting people who were trying to kill him was what he’d been trained to do, so he’d keep doing it until he couldn’t do it anymore.
But when the part of his mind that had been counting rounds reached fourteen, he stopped. Once he fired the last round, he’d be defenseless, almost certainly captured and tortured by Taliban fighters who would make him pay for every insurgent who’d died tonight. He hated the idea of putting Sienna and his family through the horror of knowing he’d spent his last few hours being tortured.
But before he could fully consider placing the barrel of his 9 mm under his chin, he knew he couldn’t do it. His whole team had gone down swinging. There was no way he could do any less.
He straightened his arm and aimed at the nearest of the men coming at him. There were at least a dozen more behind that guy. Zane would get the first one. Whatever happened after that would happen.
Zane had started to squeeze the trigger when he heard the thrum of big diesel engines followed by the chest-rattling throb of multiple heavy machine guns tearing up the world around him. The rescue party had finally arrived. But as the crowd of Taliban fighters continued to charge at him without slowing, he knew it was too late. The best he could hope for now was to die fighting.
“I’m sorry, Sienna,” he whispered, then aimed at the men again and pulled the trigger.
* * *
