Page 11 of My Forbidden Commander

I resist the urge to sigh. “I know where you were, Specialist.”

“Just saying. Best seat in the house, turns out.” He gives it a second. “Whoever assigned it must be some kind of tactical genius.”

I should reprimand him for talking to a superior officer like that. Instead, my shoulders come down an inch, and I have to fight hard not to smile.

“Move out,” I order. “We’re walking the file home a different way than we came.”

“Yes, sir.”

Shit. The hook’s back in the words, and I feel like I’m signing my own infraction report.

We rejoin the file, where Okafor takes one look at my face and starts planning the return route before I say a word. Hayes gets the report off to Kestrel in clipped bursts. Delgado shifts the heavy kit and squints at the ridge like he’s holding a personal grudge against it.

“So the good news,” Hayes whispers as we form up, “is nobody shot us.”

“The bad news,” Delgado says back, “is they’re saving us for later.”

Hayes clicks his tongue. “See, this is why nobody sits with you at chow.”

We move out through the thinning fog, me in second position, and seventy meters behind me, Reyes covers our six. Every time Okafor checks the file, the report comes up the line the same way.

Rear secure.

And for the first time since I opened his file, I believe it.

Which should make me breathe easier. Instead, it does the exact opposite.

6

NOAH

It’s the last klick back to Kestrel, and it feels like my boots weigh nothing.

I know that’s just the adrenaline. In an hour I’ll crash hard enough to sleep standing up, but right now I’m walking rear security on a column that almost got counted for a kill list, and I feel like I could run the whole way home backward.

I know where you were, Specialist.

I keep repeating his words in my head, the way he said them, resigned. He put me at the back of the column to teach me a lesson, and the back of the column is exactly where I caught the glint that turned this patrol from a nature walk into actual intelligence, and he knows it.

Colonel Gabriel Wolfe almost smiled at me on a hostile ridge line where an enemy observer had been counting our heads, and I am never going to shut up about it. Internally. Internally, I’m never going to shut up about it.

The gate detail waves us through the wire, and the file breaks apart into the mud and the noise of Kestrel. I stand there for a second with my rifle slung, watching Wolfe stride toward the ops hut with the bagged range card in his fist.

I really don’t think I’m imagining this.

The look at the range. The silence during PT. The voice that drops half an octave when we’re standing too close and climbs right back up when anyone else is in earshot. I don’t think it’s indifference.

He’s fighting this exactly as hard as I am. Harder, probably, because he’s got as many years of career as I’ve been alive and a full bird on his collar and a whole identity built out of self-control. All I’ve got is a duffel bag and a reputation for arson.

I walk to my bunk, grinning at the mud squelching under my boots. I should probably find the whole thing terrifying. But, hey, I’m nothing if not an adrenaline junkie, and everyone with eyes and ears knows it.

“Reyes. Ops hut. Now.”

Okafor delivers it from the doorway of the barracks twenty minutes later, while I’m still scraping mud off my kit. Hayes and Delgado go quiet like the man just delivered an execution order.

Hayes mouths Good knowing you at me.

The ops hut is warm and smells like burned coffee. Wolfe stands at the map table with the range card unbagged and flattened, and Okafor takes up a position at his shoulder. The satellite radio handset sits in the middle of the table like a loaded weapon. Spencer and Petrillo stand against a wall like they want to disappear.