Chapter 3
I pointed to the Tooth and told him what I had been tracking for twelve days.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "I'm going to mention this to Vickers."
I told him what my grandfather had said once after a boy at a range laughed at me: there are two ways to prove something to someone who refuses to believe it. You can argue until they get tired of disagreeing. Or you can wait until the truth becomes undeniable.
"So you're waiting?" Jonah asked.
"I'm always waiting," I said. "But I'm not waiting empty-handed."
Jonah did not get the chance to mention it to Vickers.
The patrol went out at 0630 the following morning, five men moving down the route I had been watching. I was in the medical bay running supply checks when the radio erupted — not the controlled burst of routine comms but the layered noise of a situation coming apart faster than language could track it. Contact on the valley route. IED hit. Two men down. Vickers, who had been on the patrol, was mobile but hit in the leg. The others were pinned behind the blast rubble, taking fire from the far ridge.
From the Tooth. Exactly where I had told Galloway to watch.
I was out of the medical bay with my kit before the second radio transmission finished. The firebase security element was moving to the gate when I passed them. I told the man nearest me to bring a rifle and follow. He hesitated. I kept moving.
The valley route was two hundred meters of broken ground below the firebase, and I ran it the way you run in altitude when you have been conditioning for it — controlled, head down, conserving oxygen, eating the distance rather than fighting it. The smoke from the IED was still rising in a black column when I reached the rubble. Two men behind cover. One unconscious. One trying to keep pressure on his own arm while watching the ridge.
Vickers was propped against a section of broken wall, his left leg out in front of him, the thigh torn through the uniform. He was conscious and furious — the specific fury of a man who has been hit in a way that has removed his ability to do something he was going to do.
He saw me coming and grabbed my sleeve.
May you like
"Get out of here, Carter."
"Not without you," I said.
